Dr. Marion Nestle, professor of nutrition, food studies and public health at New York University, spoke to students and community members March 13 with her lecture, “Obesity Wars: the Food Industry versus Public Health.”

UW-Whitewater invited Nestle in an attempt to get students more involved in what is going on in the food industry.

“This is a very important public policy issue that we’re talking about and given Marion’s strong scholarly background and prevalence in popular culture, we thought that she’d be able to cover the topic at a level that students would understand and find relevant,” lecture organizer and Professor Susan Johnson said.

Nestle’s presentation focused on food insecurity and obesity, as well as the role that politics have in both of these issues.

“In public health, you define an issue’s importance by how many people are affected and by those criteria, food insecurity and obesity are by far the most important public health and nutrition problems in the world today,” Nestle said. “I am particularly interested in the effects of food processing and marketing on both of those.”

Nestle said last year, 46 million Americans received food stamps, which is double the amount from five years ago.

“The point about malnutrition and food insecurity that I think needs to be understood is that it’s not just a matter of having enough food,” Nestle said. “If you want to make sure that developing countries have enough food to promote food security, you have to handle the causes of not having enough food.”

Nestle said deregulation of agriculture, Wall Street and food marketing was what started the obesity problem in the U.S. in the 1980s.

According to Nestle, since the 1980s the amount of money people spend eating outside the home has increased, with much of that money spent at fast food places.

“This was a simple matter of supply and demand,” Nestle said. “There was so much food available it became cheap to eat out, but food outside the home has more calories than food prepared in the home and fast food has more than anything.”

Nestle said a second factor was an increase in portion size.

“If you only take home one thing from tonight, please know that larger portions have more calories,” Nestle said.

According to Nestle, larger portions do three things: they have more calories, they induce people to eat more calories, and they induce people to underestimate the amount of calories they are eating by a larger fraction then people who eat smaller portions. They are also much harder to work off.

Another contributor to the obesity problem in the U.S. is the price of food, particularly good food, Nestle said.

“If you go to McDonalds with five dollars, you can buy five hamburgers or one salad,” Nestle said.  “When poor people say that they cannot afford to eat fruits and vegetables, it’s because they can’t. The relative price of fruits and vegetables has increased dramatically.”

Nestle said the only way to combat the underlying problems of food insecurity and obesity is to get political.

“I’m interested in turning students into food activists,” Nestle said. “I talk about food politics, and my goal is to get young people interested in the food movement, to join the food movement, to understand how useful it is and to get active politically through food.”

Johnson said one of UW-Whitewater’s goals is just that.

“I would hope that students might grab the ball and run with it and do something, like with what W3 [The Working for Whitewater’s Wellness Coalition] is already doing,” Johnson said. “[This lecture] wasn’t meant to start a movement, but it was meant to raise awareness of it and hopefully, get more people interested in it.”