The Food You Eat May Kill You

By Anastasia Toufexis

Americans have long been treated to a barrage of dietary advice from health officials, some of it frightening, some useful -- and some just plain confusing. Last week they got the strongest and clearest warning yet that what they eat can kill them. In the first ever Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health, a 712-page document that draws on more than 2,000 studies, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop cautions that the U.S. population eats altogether too much, and too much of the wrong foods, especially saturated fats. Says Koop: "Your choice of diet can influence your long-term health prospects more than any other action you might take."

The report, prepared with the help of 200 doctors, nutritionists and researchers, is the most comprehensive governmental review yet of the connection between diet and health. Though little in it is really new, its very heft is impressive. Diet, the report states, helped account for more than two-thirds of the 2.1 million deaths in the U.S. last year. Poor nutritional habits are strongly implicated in five of the nation's top ten killers: coronary heart disease, stroke, atherosclerosis, diabetes and some cancers. Excessive alcohol use is linked to three other leading causes of death: cirrhosis of the liver, accidents and suicide.

While noting that other factors, like heredity and environment, contribute to the development of chronic ailments, the report stresses that aside from drinking or smoking, diet is the "one personal choice" that more than any other influences long-term health prospects. The Surgeon General's Report urges the public to cut back on saturated fats and cholesterol, mainly from meat and dairy products, and concentrate on fish, skinned poultry, fruits, vegetables and whole grain products. Fat, which increases the risk for obesity, heart disease and cancer, now accounts for 37% of the calories in the American diet, well above the 30% recommended by many health experts.

The Surgeon General wants Americans to minimize the use of salt in cooking and at the table, and to limit alcohol intake to no more than two drinks a day. Pregnant women are cautioned to skip liquor altogether. Other advice: adolescent girls and premenopausal women should increase consumption of calcium-rich foods to guard against osteoporosis, and children and women of childbearing age should be sure to eat foods high in iron to prevent anemia, a condition prevalent in low-income families.

Critics promptly blasted the report for failing to break any new ground and complained that it did not address the need for nutrition education programs or tough regulations governing food labeling. Still, the document was welcomed as reinforcement for a host of warnings and advisories issued earlier by federal agencies, including the Department of Agriculture and the National Cancer Institute, and such organizations as the American Heart Association and the American Cancer Society.

U.S. health officials hope the new Surgeon General's report will have the same galvanizing effect on the public's eating habits that the 1964 Government warning about tobacco had on smoking. Koop sees plenty of similarities. Both areas, he says, have been fraught with "controversy and misunderstanding." But with one significant difference: "The depth of the science underlying this report's findings is even more impressive than that for tobacco and health in 1964." Now that the Surgeon General has spoken, will Americans listen?