Luise Light, Ed.D. is putting her experiences in a book due out next year: Ketchup is not a Vegetable: Sane Eating in a Toxic World.
November 2004 | Whole Health: Clean Food
Pulverizing the Pyramid
by Rebecca Ephraim
Dr. Luise Light (with a doctorate in public health and masters in nutrition science, both from Columbia University) doesn’t mince words as she recounts her experience as a government nutritionist who watched in revulsion as the USDA complied with the food industry to cater to their profit needs at the expense of the public’s health.
Luise Light: Optimal nutrition is critical for healthy conception, pregnancy, infancy, childhood, maturation and a healthy old age—the whole developmental process. Our government should be vigorous in supporting the public with the best information, not the least and the most compromised. But food guides and the dietary guidelines from the government are no better than promotional tools for the food industry and this time it’s no different.
Rebecca: You don’t believe there’s any improvement?
Dr. Light: No. What they won’t tell us is how to prioritize foods on the basis of their nutrition and health-related contents. Where we are with nutrition is a return to calories as the bad guy. So, once again, no food can be called bad. This is exactly where we were when I arrived at the door of the USDA in the ‘80s and the simplistic “Basic Four” was the operative food guide. The government hasn’t begun to invest in optimal nutrition and we are paying the price with the increasingly poor health of Americans.
Rebecca: Are you concerned about repercussions from being so candid?
Dr. Light: I thought about that a lot. The pressure never let up when I was working for agriculture [USDA]. Cattlemen, for instance, would corner me in airports when I was traveling for the government and they would harangue me about my positions. The whole system [of formulating the food recommendations] was like a machine going in one direction and I was part of it! It was very disheartening. My feeling now is ‘I’ve come this far in life; I have to say what I see, what I know.’
Rebecca: This happened in the ‘80s, why did you wait to tell your story?
Dr. Light: I eventually had an adrenal breakdown and left Washington. I was so disgusted with it and the sleazy politics that were constant and obviously getting worse, not better. I had to do something else ‘cause it was killing me. I went through a long process of physical, spiritual and emotional healing. I studied intuitive healing, which led me to the realization that I needed to tell this story.
Rebecca Ephraim is a registered dietitian and certified clinical nutritionist.
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