Customer Reviews

Beating the Food Giants

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I implore everyone who's considering reading this book to do just that. You will be outraged at the underhanded deceitful things big food manufacturers do to keep America over fed and undernourished. Mister Stitt is an insider, not some outside antagonist making accusations, that alone makes his words more than believable. Although this book was published in the 80's, I believe its words are more true today than they were back then. Obesity is an epidemic in this country and I for one believe there is more to it than people not eating right and exercising. We have more over-processed, chemical laden foods being sold to the public than ever before. Yet, we act like obesity, cancer, heart disease and other health problems happen with no logical explanation. Mister Stitt explains how food manufacturers deliberately add chemicals to food to make people eat more. All of a sudden those days when I ate uncontrollably began to make sense. Stitt blows the whistle on this billion dollar industry and I commend him for doing so. America had better wise up and do it quickly because our health is under attack and it has been for some time. One of the biggest terrorist organizations ever exist right here in the United States and they are "The Food Giants." Their acts may not be as blatant as those of 9-11 but they are no less devastating. Read this book, and you will never look at food the same way again. You won't be dissappointed.

Paul Stitt, a biochemist working for Tenneco with a desire to end world hunger, sets out to create an economically feasible process whereby protein from bacteria can be grown on natural gas. Tenneco was happy to advertise this altruistic effort as they raised the price of their gas.

After a little over a year of 14 to 16-hour workdays, Stitt and his team succeeded in producing protein for 11 cents a pound. Stitt writes: "A plant covering one square mile could produce enough protein to feed 10 million people!" His reward? On the afternoon of New Year's Eve his project was terminated and the staff fired. It seems there's more profit in advertising altruistic efforts than in actually executing them.

Next stop: Quaker Oats Company where Stitt was eventually fired and blackballed by the food industry because he was more interested in creating nutritional food than in corporate sales and profit. With nowhere to go and a burning desire to feed people, he invested everything he had in a bakery and successfully produced nutritionally dense bread products made from whole grains and flax seeds.

In this informative and well-written book you'll get an insider's view of the unethical practices, greed, and disregard for human life and health by the food industry. You'll also learn some of the ways that inferior nutrition leads to disease.

Stitt writes about the various projects he worked on at the food companies and their unethical practices to create cheap, tasty, nutritionally depleted food that will encourage you to eat more. You'll learn that New and Improved doesn't mean the company improved the quality of the food, but that they found a means of shaving a few cents off in production by substituting cheaper materials.

It's a sad commentary on food politics to learn that pet food is fed to animals to determine its nutritional adequacy but human food is not fed to anyone because tests might show it to be harmful to health.

Stitt includes advice for improving your health (some of which I find outdated) and a chapter of recipes. Be advised, though, that he is heavily biased toward grains and plant nutrition. But his advice to eat whole foods and avoid processed foods is sound.

I wish everybody who shopped the center aisles could read this book.