When Americans took the government’s test on healthful eating, they failed. OK, maybe they just got a D, depending on what you call 64 points out of a possible 100. That was the average score of 7,500 representative Americans who were quizzed as part of the USDA’s Healthy Eating Index.
The test was to see how well they were following the department’s two outlines for healthy eating, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the Food Guide Pyramid.
But how bad it is depends on how you look at it. Unlike many people in the Third World, Americans aren’t starving. Most get more than enough protein and calories.
Yet the USDA’s annual index tells a sad story when it comes to how well the country is using its wealth of food. Despite our abundant and high-quality food supply, researchers say, Americans are heading for more diet-related diseases such as cancer, heart disease, obesity and osteoporosis.
Several factors are leading us on this self-destructive pathway. We don’t choose a wide variety of foods, we think a normal portion is like that served in restaurants, we eat too much fat and not enough vegetables and fruits, and meat still occupies the most space on our dinner plates. The final straw may be our lack of exercise.
All this despite our growing awareness of the connection between diet and health. About 80 percent of a nationwide sample of people in American Dietetic Association’s annual Nutrition Trends Survey said diet and nutrition were important to them, while 71 percent said they paid attention to nutrition information on labels.
Food manufacturers have taken note of the public’s interest in nutrition. A flood of health-oriented food items has swept into supermarkets. More than 1,400 new low- or no-fat products arrived last year, according to New Product News, a trade publication. That is more than twice the number introduced five years before.
And America is buying the trend, switching to healthier options. For example, though Americans’ milk consumption in general has dropped, more of the milk that people are drinking is lower in fat.
“Last year skim was the only fluid milk category to grow,” to an average of 3.3 gallons per person, says Judith Putnam, an agricultural economist with the USDA in Washington, D.C.
“There’s no doubt people have more nutrition information than ever before, and people are buying nutrition-conscious products,” says Alicia Moag-Stahlberg, director of the U.S. National Dietary Data Center at Northwestern University. “But overall it doesn’t seem to be working.
“Years ago people could say they didn’t know what a healthful diet was or that healthful foods were not readily available. But there’s no excuse anymore. All the tools are there to improve our health through diet.”
But we’re not doing it, as the USDA’s eating index shows. The index breaks a respondent’s diet into 10 components and, depending on how well the diet follows nutrition guidelines, awards up to 10 points per component: grains, vegetables, fruits, milk, meat, total fat, saturated fat, dietary cholesterol, sodium and variety.
Only in the areas of meat and cholesterol does the U.S. diet score more than 7 points (see chart).
Fewer than one in five people eats the recommended servings of grains, vegetables and fruits called for in the Food Guide Pyramid, according to the index, and less than a third consume the right amount of protein or dairy products.
Yet 80 percent eat more than the recommended amounts of total fat and saturated fat. That’s obvious when you consider that 34 percent of Americans are obese, a figure that has climbed by 8 percentage points in the last five years.
That amazing statistic is due to poor diet and a lack of exercise, says former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who has begun Shape Up America, a privately financed national campaign against obesity.
More disturbing, is news that Americans now drink about 1 1/2 times as much soda pop as milk, almost a complete reversal of the ratio 20 years ago.
That is a frightening figure, says Dr. Robert Heaney, an osteoporosis researcher at Creighton University in Omaha.
“There is only so much fluid we can drink each day. If it’s diet pop rather than skim milk, it means that we aren’t getting calcium from the milk,” he says. “Anything putting us at low calcium intake is putting us at increased risk for getting a fracture.”
Osteoporosis, in which bones become fragile as they lose calcium, already costs the U.S. economy $9 billion a year, and as calcium intake declines it will get worse, Heaney says.
It is somewhat encouraging that the amount of carbohydrates in the diet has increased overall, from 43 percent to 49 percent, says Carol Smeja, sociologist and vice president of MCRA National Marketing Information Services in Des Plaines.
Unfortunately, much of that increase may be due to our national sweet tooth rather than to any love of vegetables, whole grains and beans.
“White bread is the most popular (carbohydrate), with sweet breads, cookies and pastries following closely,” she says.
Meanwhile, evidence increases every year that eating a variety of vegetables and fruits provides vitamins, minerals, fiber and traces of other chemicals that are very valuable in preventing chronic diseases such as cancers and heart disease. Unfortunately, we are not eating them.
“The problem is, we never really moved toward the food pyramid in our habits,” says Harry Balzer, vice president of NPD Group, a market-research company in Park Ridge.
“In fact, we have been eating the same things, but in lower-fat versions. People didn’t have to change what they were eating to believe they were eating healthier.” Of course, many of those low-fat products are still high in calories, and many see them as a license to overindulge, which doesn’t help problems with obesity.
Nutritionists are worried about two other influences on the American diet, Moag-Stahlberg says: lack of variety and excessive portion size.
Despite the thousands of foods available, the Healthy Eating Index and other diet assessments show that people are eating too many fats and sweets, and too few fruits, vegetables and whole grains.
That is especially true for meals eaten away from home, where the portion served often is more than twice the size of what’s specified in the pyramid.
“About the only time a food-service portion resembles a standard serving size is on an airplane. Most of the time the amount of meat, pasta and beverages are large so that people think they are getting value for their money,” she says.
For instance, the original bottle of Coke, popular in the 1950s and early ’60s, was 8 ounces. Now it’s impossible to get anything less than a 12-ounce can.
Ultimately it’s a matter of balance, Moag-Stahlberg says. If you eat a varied diet and balance it, you can work practically any type of food into it.
“It doesn’t make any difference where you eat or who’s doing the cooking, if the foods are right.”
Price and convenience also are influential, Putnam says. “When a fast-food place can offer a double cheeseburger for 99 cents, quickly prepared and conveniently packaged with no dishes to do, that has a profound effect on what people choose.”
Where does that put us?
“Lasting changes in human food habits seem to come quite slowly,” says dietitian Dayle Hayes, who helps form policy for the American Dietetic Association.
Despite minor improvements, it won’t be easy to improve the report card on American eating habits, she says.
Americans have to move away from notions of foods as politically correct (such as vegetarian diets), morally right (as in organic movements) or “passionately tasteful,” like Haagen-Dazs bars, Hayes says, and start seeing food as “a marriage of taste and health, variety and moderation.”
In our land of bounty, that kind of marriage has every hope of success. And maybe we’ll rate a B-plus the next time around.
