My soymilk is making me mad again.
I drink soymilk in my coffee every morning – largely because I prefer the taste to that of cows' milk, but also because I'm lactose intolerant. I look forward to it, because it tastes good, and I'm brand loyal, too – I prefer both the taste and the lower calorie content of the 8th Continent brand. (The 8th Continent "light" variety has 60 calories per serving, compared to Silk's 80, which is as much as 8th Continent's full-fat option. 2% milk has, for comparison, 130 calories per serving. That I even know this, or that other people would consider such knowledge normal, bothers me, but on with the story.)
So, one of the reasons I choose the milk-like product I put in my coffee is, in fact, something akin to Slimming Power – or at least, Less-Fattening Power. I don't think it's magical, and I will sometimes use regular milk, or even cream, in my coffee, but I am aware of this element, anyway.
But that doesn't mean I was pleased when, a few months ago, my soymilk started showing up with big (obnoxiously obstructive) stick-on labels loudly proclaiming that in order to fight heart disease, the NUMBER ONE KILLER OF AMERICAN WOMEN, I needed to drink this soymilk. This label, and, it turned out, the nastily hard-to-peel cover inside the cap, were also covered in
this logo (minus the lettering) – apparently the symbol for the NIH's "Heart Truth National Awareness Campaign for Women about Heart Disease". I didn't find out until today that this graphic is a national one, but that just expands the anger, because what's immediately apparent to me is that this dress, with its slim, hour-glass silhouette, immediately links preventing heart disease with being thin.
I mean, look at it! It clearly says "not having heart disease has a shape, and that shape is the most culturally desired one for women! Also, health is like fashion!" I find both of those implications highly offensive. Preventing heart disease does not have a shape – at most, it has a Set of Lacks and Activities, such as not smoking and getting moderate levels of exercise and not being eighty. (Heart disease is, in part, such a "killer" because risks of heart disease – particularly of fatalheart disease – increase significantly with age, and Americans, in general healthier than we have ever been, are living longer and longer.)
Moreover, in the case of the soymilk, right under the heart disease thing and a statement that "8th Continent" supports Women's Heart Health" or something, was of course a line about having "40% fewer calories than the leading vanilla soymilk." Now, as I've already said, I do make calorie content part of my decision-making process when selecting my soymilk. I do that by reading the (government-mandated since the 1980s) "nutrition label." As do all other calorie-conscious consumers, because we've been taught – in my generation's case, raised – that you always have to look at those numbers and make your decisions by them. But at my most "calorie conscious" (read: anorexic) I've always simply not put any milk in my coffee, regardless of its calorie content.
So not only did it seem, with the introduction of this packaging, that 8th continent was implying I didn't have the wit to make my own "nutritional" decisions, it was also making a claim that soymilk would keep me thin – oh wait, I mean "healthy" – a claim which I don't really believe. The answer to my quarrels is of course that weren't trying to attract me, the already-dedicated soymilk consumer, but the middle-aged, female, regular milk consumer who might glance at the bottle and decide that she'd better switch to soymilk. Way to go, food products industry. Influence choice through fear and self-loathing. Not that that's unique to soymilk – thousands of foodstuffs do it. But it makes me sick.
Plus, of course, there's the implication that primarily – or only – women should be concerned with heart health and consuming soymilk. I'm sure they did a study and found that women were the primary consumers for their product, but this kind of thinking is exclusionary and negative, rather than added-value and positive. Just because a particular group is the primary consumer group for your product (or you wish they were) shouldn't mean that you ignore or actively exclude other groups! That's just silly! If you're going to go the heart-health route, why imply that men don't need to be worried about their heart health either? And why on earth would you want to exclude men from purchasing soymilk by packaging it in a way that clearly says "this is a gender-specific product, and You Are Not It!"
This pushes me away too, in fact – as someone (third-fourth-whatever-wave feminist; bisexual; gender-aware) who really dislikes being aggressively gendered by the things I consume, I will often not choose products that seem "girly" or pushily "womanized." I really like being female. And that includes the freedom to determine, at least partially, what "being female" means for me. I'm not alone in this, either, though I accept that I'm not in the majority. I probably am closer to in the majority, however, among, say, vegans, hippies, or hipsters – groups that are likely to consume soymilk! I don't have any numbers, but I would guess that soymilk consumers tend to be younger, more highly educated, more liberal, more likely to be non-traditionally identified, etc. – all things that do not speak to the aggressively gendered approach I found on my soymilk bottle a few months ago.
I was irritated, but I kept buying it, and after a little while the red dress thing went away, and I was glad. But today, when I looked at the new bottle I got, I found a new label that is, possibly even more irritating, because it's subtler and, in fact, more deceptive. The red theme is back, though more attractively designed – the "8" is red, the "o" in "continent" is a red heart, and the cap on the bottle is red too. Then there's a red banner across the top of the front label that says "Improved for your Heart Health! Now contains ingredients that can help [and this part is contained within a white heart] lower cholesterol* reduce the risk of high blood pressure and stroke**"
There's also a logo that asserts that this product has been approved by "bestlife," which turns out, once you go to their website, to be the logo for a diet book and plan "authored by Bob Greene, Oprah's trainer." Apparently, this book contains a series of product tie-ins, where various brands, among them Cheerios, 8th Continent, and Cascadian Farms granola, are "the official" brand of some kind of food Greene recommends. Must make a lot of money for the companies and for Greene! But wait! I’m on the wrong track – this is about my health, right? Let's see what Oprah, who wrote the foreword to the book, has to say about that, as quoted on the frontpage for the best life diet:
My god! Who knew that when I was buying the wrong products, I was living a life of lies that made me ugly to myself and others! I want to be free! Free to buy only the products whose makers paid Bob Greene a lot of money, money he paid Oprah, who also paid him! Wow! Normally, I’m pro-Oprah, but I find this disgusting.
But wait, I'm forgetting about the hard science implied by that red banner, aren't I? What about these magical new ingredients that are going to lower my cholesterol and stop me from getting a heart attack or a stroke? (Never mind that nobody asked me whether I wanted more weird shit in my food. Of course I must want additives, if they're vitamins and minerals that give me health!)
So let's read the small print those asterisks lead me to. (Something that a grocery store buyer is probably not going to do – it's really small. It is on the front label still, though, which is kind of surprising.) The first asterisk is supposed to be about lowering cholesterol. Expanded text says "25 grams of soy protein a day, as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol, may reduce the risk of heart disease. 8th Continent Soymilk contains 6.25 grams of soy protein per serving." The second one is supposed to be about reducing the risk of high blood pressure and stroke, and it says "Diets containing foods that are good sources of potassium and low in sodium may reduce the risk of high blood pressure and stroke."
So here's the claim: my soymilk is new and improved because it includes soy??? Oh, for fuck's sake! Soymilk is, presumably, already pretty damn high in soy, which is naturally pretty fucking high in potassium -- and all milks, soy or otherwise, aren't sodium-rich foods! Peel away the low-fat, thin-you, healthy-you bullshit, and you get "this is a soy product, and soy (when combined with low blood pressure and low cholesterol – nice bit of circular "evidence" there) may possibly maybe it could be reduce the risk of heart disease.
So the labelling's complete bullshit. But how about the claim, at base, that soy is good for your heart? I happen to have just finished reading The Gospel of Food, by Barry Glassner, which goes into this claim, among many others, in detail. Now, just so you know, Glassner is not some kook – he's a respected sociologist at USC, which means he knows how to read numbers, interpret statistics, and find scientific evidence. He's also the author of The Culture of Fear, which you may remember as the basis for most of the social science in Bowling for Columbine (not that Michael Moore is much of a scientist, but to the degree that he is, he gets it from Glassner), and which is even better than Gospel of Food. Incidentally, he also went to high school with my parents and briefly dated my mother.
So what does Glassner find about the actual heart-health benefits of soy consumption? They're dubious, at best! There has been only one study, Glassner finds, that actually shows any overall benefit from soy – a trial made by ConAgra, a soy manufacturer, which found that when seventeen (a laughably small sample size) college students were fed burgers with soy added every day for a month, their cholesterol levels dropped significantly (in a study that small, this means only two or so students' cholesterol levels would have to have dropped, and only temporarily) below that of the control group (Food 55, 242n29). By contrast, a study which examined the FDA claim that "25 grams of soy protein a day" reduces risk of heart disease (and this study's sample size was still only forty-two – these numbers are standard for the food "science" we let rule so much of our lives) found that there was no scientifically verifiable benefit from increased soy consumption – only one laboratory in the original study reported any favorable effects at all. No one else found any change. An even larger Dutch study (sample size, 202), also found no effect (56).
Moreover, at least two studies have actually suggested that over-consumption of isoflavones, the supposed health-boosting ingredient in most soy products, may actually increase the risk of heart disease or hormonal imbalance (54-57)! I'm not, actually, worried that my soymilk is going to give me a heart attack or cancer, but I certainly don't believe that it's going to prevent those things either! The upshot is that all of this "science" isn't really science at all – and that it's telling me nothing!
(I highly recommend Gospel of Food, by the way, and if anyone who lives near me wants to borrow my copy, I'm happy to lend it to you. I also recommend another book Glassner refers to, Paul Campos's The Obesity Myth, which is a very readable dismantling of popular claims about the "obesity epidemic," using a ton of available, but usually ignored, scientific evidence. Campos himself is not a scientist – he's a lawyer. The book, however, is based on the evidence Campos finds in the reports of scientists. Campos uses his good logical reading and writing skills to make those reports accessible to non-scientific readers.)
So what did I find on the label of my soymilk this morning? A whole bunch of marketing techniques designed to scare and mislead me with pseudoscientific and political claims into purchasing a product I would have purchased, for much sounder reasons, anyway. And it makes me just plain mad. It's almost enough, actually, to make me want to switch brands or stop consuming the product entirely. Since I only drink soymilk in my coffee anyway, taste isn't that important to me, and it isn't as if the other brand, Silk, tastes bad. Silk is also significantly cheaper than 8th Continent, and the twenty-calorie difference isn't, when I think about it rationally, actually that big of a deal. I don’t drink a whole cup of the stuff, anyway, and if I'm that worried about getting calories from my coffee, I can go back to drinking it without any milk at all. I use soymilk for pleasure and taste anyway. That concerns about fat intrude on that experience kind of negates the pleasure, you know?
And so does the idea that I have to be constantly vigilant about whether food labels are selling me a bill of goods. I expect advertising on the label of anything I buy, of course. I like advertising. If I like a company's campaign, I'm definitely more likely to buy their product. But I am way, way less likely to buy a product whose advertising I think is trying to scare, guilt, or delude me – and that's how I feel about 8th continent soymilk right now. And my hope, since this is a piece of argumentative writing, is that you'll feel that way about it now, too.
I drink soymilk in my coffee every morning – largely because I prefer the taste to that of cows' milk, but also because I'm lactose intolerant. I look forward to it, because it tastes good, and I'm brand loyal, too – I prefer both the taste and the lower calorie content of the 8th Continent brand. (The 8th Continent "light" variety has 60 calories per serving, compared to Silk's 80, which is as much as 8th Continent's full-fat option. 2% milk has, for comparison, 130 calories per serving. That I even know this, or that other people would consider such knowledge normal, bothers me, but on with the story.)
So, one of the reasons I choose the milk-like product I put in my coffee is, in fact, something akin to Slimming Power – or at least, Less-Fattening Power. I don't think it's magical, and I will sometimes use regular milk, or even cream, in my coffee, but I am aware of this element, anyway.
But that doesn't mean I was pleased when, a few months ago, my soymilk started showing up with big (obnoxiously obstructive) stick-on labels loudly proclaiming that in order to fight heart disease, the NUMBER ONE KILLER OF AMERICAN WOMEN, I needed to drink this soymilk. This label, and, it turned out, the nastily hard-to-peel cover inside the cap, were also covered in
this logo (minus the lettering) – apparently the symbol for the NIH's "Heart Truth National Awareness Campaign for Women about Heart Disease". I didn't find out until today that this graphic is a national one, but that just expands the anger, because what's immediately apparent to me is that this dress, with its slim, hour-glass silhouette, immediately links preventing heart disease with being thin. I mean, look at it! It clearly says "not having heart disease has a shape, and that shape is the most culturally desired one for women! Also, health is like fashion!" I find both of those implications highly offensive. Preventing heart disease does not have a shape – at most, it has a Set of Lacks and Activities, such as not smoking and getting moderate levels of exercise and not being eighty. (Heart disease is, in part, such a "killer" because risks of heart disease – particularly of fatalheart disease – increase significantly with age, and Americans, in general healthier than we have ever been, are living longer and longer.)
Moreover, in the case of the soymilk, right under the heart disease thing and a statement that "8th Continent" supports Women's Heart Health" or something, was of course a line about having "40% fewer calories than the leading vanilla soymilk." Now, as I've already said, I do make calorie content part of my decision-making process when selecting my soymilk. I do that by reading the (government-mandated since the 1980s) "nutrition label." As do all other calorie-conscious consumers, because we've been taught – in my generation's case, raised – that you always have to look at those numbers and make your decisions by them. But at my most "calorie conscious" (read: anorexic) I've always simply not put any milk in my coffee, regardless of its calorie content.
So not only did it seem, with the introduction of this packaging, that 8th continent was implying I didn't have the wit to make my own "nutritional" decisions, it was also making a claim that soymilk would keep me thin – oh wait, I mean "healthy" – a claim which I don't really believe. The answer to my quarrels is of course that weren't trying to attract me, the already-dedicated soymilk consumer, but the middle-aged, female, regular milk consumer who might glance at the bottle and decide that she'd better switch to soymilk. Way to go, food products industry. Influence choice through fear and self-loathing. Not that that's unique to soymilk – thousands of foodstuffs do it. But it makes me sick.
Plus, of course, there's the implication that primarily – or only – women should be concerned with heart health and consuming soymilk. I'm sure they did a study and found that women were the primary consumers for their product, but this kind of thinking is exclusionary and negative, rather than added-value and positive. Just because a particular group is the primary consumer group for your product (or you wish they were) shouldn't mean that you ignore or actively exclude other groups! That's just silly! If you're going to go the heart-health route, why imply that men don't need to be worried about their heart health either? And why on earth would you want to exclude men from purchasing soymilk by packaging it in a way that clearly says "this is a gender-specific product, and You Are Not It!"
This pushes me away too, in fact – as someone (third-fourth-whatever-wave feminist; bisexual; gender-aware) who really dislikes being aggressively gendered by the things I consume, I will often not choose products that seem "girly" or pushily "womanized." I really like being female. And that includes the freedom to determine, at least partially, what "being female" means for me. I'm not alone in this, either, though I accept that I'm not in the majority. I probably am closer to in the majority, however, among, say, vegans, hippies, or hipsters – groups that are likely to consume soymilk! I don't have any numbers, but I would guess that soymilk consumers tend to be younger, more highly educated, more liberal, more likely to be non-traditionally identified, etc. – all things that do not speak to the aggressively gendered approach I found on my soymilk bottle a few months ago.
I was irritated, but I kept buying it, and after a little while the red dress thing went away, and I was glad. But today, when I looked at the new bottle I got, I found a new label that is, possibly even more irritating, because it's subtler and, in fact, more deceptive. The red theme is back, though more attractively designed – the "8" is red, the "o" in "continent" is a red heart, and the cap on the bottle is red too. Then there's a red banner across the top of the front label that says "Improved for your Heart Health! Now contains ingredients that can help [and this part is contained within a white heart] lower cholesterol* reduce the risk of high blood pressure and stroke**"
There's also a logo that asserts that this product has been approved by "bestlife," which turns out, once you go to their website, to be the logo for a diet book and plan "authored by Bob Greene, Oprah's trainer." Apparently, this book contains a series of product tie-ins, where various brands, among them Cheerios, 8th Continent, and Cascadian Farms granola, are "the official" brand of some kind of food Greene recommends. Must make a lot of money for the companies and for Greene! But wait! I’m on the wrong track – this is about my health, right? Let's see what Oprah, who wrote the foreword to the book, has to say about that, as quoted on the frontpage for the best life diet:
Every unwanted pound creates another layer of lies. It’s only when you peel back those layers that you will be set free: Free to work out, free to eat responsibly, free to live the life you want and deserve to live. Tell the truth and you’ll learn to eat to satisfy your physical hunger and stop burying your hopes and dreams beneath layers of fat..
My god! Who knew that when I was buying the wrong products, I was living a life of lies that made me ugly to myself and others! I want to be free! Free to buy only the products whose makers paid Bob Greene a lot of money, money he paid Oprah, who also paid him! Wow! Normally, I’m pro-Oprah, but I find this disgusting.
But wait, I'm forgetting about the hard science implied by that red banner, aren't I? What about these magical new ingredients that are going to lower my cholesterol and stop me from getting a heart attack or a stroke? (Never mind that nobody asked me whether I wanted more weird shit in my food. Of course I must want additives, if they're vitamins and minerals that give me health!)
So let's read the small print those asterisks lead me to. (Something that a grocery store buyer is probably not going to do – it's really small. It is on the front label still, though, which is kind of surprising.) The first asterisk is supposed to be about lowering cholesterol. Expanded text says "25 grams of soy protein a day, as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol, may reduce the risk of heart disease. 8th Continent Soymilk contains 6.25 grams of soy protein per serving." The second one is supposed to be about reducing the risk of high blood pressure and stroke, and it says "Diets containing foods that are good sources of potassium and low in sodium may reduce the risk of high blood pressure and stroke."
So here's the claim: my soymilk is new and improved because it includes soy??? Oh, for fuck's sake! Soymilk is, presumably, already pretty damn high in soy, which is naturally pretty fucking high in potassium -- and all milks, soy or otherwise, aren't sodium-rich foods! Peel away the low-fat, thin-you, healthy-you bullshit, and you get "this is a soy product, and soy (when combined with low blood pressure and low cholesterol – nice bit of circular "evidence" there) may possibly maybe it could be reduce the risk of heart disease.
So the labelling's complete bullshit. But how about the claim, at base, that soy is good for your heart? I happen to have just finished reading The Gospel of Food, by Barry Glassner, which goes into this claim, among many others, in detail. Now, just so you know, Glassner is not some kook – he's a respected sociologist at USC, which means he knows how to read numbers, interpret statistics, and find scientific evidence. He's also the author of The Culture of Fear, which you may remember as the basis for most of the social science in Bowling for Columbine (not that Michael Moore is much of a scientist, but to the degree that he is, he gets it from Glassner), and which is even better than Gospel of Food. Incidentally, he also went to high school with my parents and briefly dated my mother.
So what does Glassner find about the actual heart-health benefits of soy consumption? They're dubious, at best! There has been only one study, Glassner finds, that actually shows any overall benefit from soy – a trial made by ConAgra, a soy manufacturer, which found that when seventeen (a laughably small sample size) college students were fed burgers with soy added every day for a month, their cholesterol levels dropped significantly (in a study that small, this means only two or so students' cholesterol levels would have to have dropped, and only temporarily) below that of the control group (Food 55, 242n29). By contrast, a study which examined the FDA claim that "25 grams of soy protein a day" reduces risk of heart disease (and this study's sample size was still only forty-two – these numbers are standard for the food "science" we let rule so much of our lives) found that there was no scientifically verifiable benefit from increased soy consumption – only one laboratory in the original study reported any favorable effects at all. No one else found any change. An even larger Dutch study (sample size, 202), also found no effect (56).
Moreover, at least two studies have actually suggested that over-consumption of isoflavones, the supposed health-boosting ingredient in most soy products, may actually increase the risk of heart disease or hormonal imbalance (54-57)! I'm not, actually, worried that my soymilk is going to give me a heart attack or cancer, but I certainly don't believe that it's going to prevent those things either! The upshot is that all of this "science" isn't really science at all – and that it's telling me nothing!
(I highly recommend Gospel of Food, by the way, and if anyone who lives near me wants to borrow my copy, I'm happy to lend it to you. I also recommend another book Glassner refers to, Paul Campos's The Obesity Myth, which is a very readable dismantling of popular claims about the "obesity epidemic," using a ton of available, but usually ignored, scientific evidence. Campos himself is not a scientist – he's a lawyer. The book, however, is based on the evidence Campos finds in the reports of scientists. Campos uses his good logical reading and writing skills to make those reports accessible to non-scientific readers.)
So what did I find on the label of my soymilk this morning? A whole bunch of marketing techniques designed to scare and mislead me with pseudoscientific and political claims into purchasing a product I would have purchased, for much sounder reasons, anyway. And it makes me just plain mad. It's almost enough, actually, to make me want to switch brands or stop consuming the product entirely. Since I only drink soymilk in my coffee anyway, taste isn't that important to me, and it isn't as if the other brand, Silk, tastes bad. Silk is also significantly cheaper than 8th Continent, and the twenty-calorie difference isn't, when I think about it rationally, actually that big of a deal. I don’t drink a whole cup of the stuff, anyway, and if I'm that worried about getting calories from my coffee, I can go back to drinking it without any milk at all. I use soymilk for pleasure and taste anyway. That concerns about fat intrude on that experience kind of negates the pleasure, you know?
And so does the idea that I have to be constantly vigilant about whether food labels are selling me a bill of goods. I expect advertising on the label of anything I buy, of course. I like advertising. If I like a company's campaign, I'm definitely more likely to buy their product. But I am way, way less likely to buy a product whose advertising I think is trying to scare, guilt, or delude me – and that's how I feel about 8th continent soymilk right now. And my hope, since this is a piece of argumentative writing, is that you'll feel that way about it now, too.
I have to say that I have heard all sort of BS about soy, including that it gives you the titty cancer, so I would be leery of any claims made by the manufacturer.
That said, isn't pretty much all health advertising driven by the fear of death? It's a fear-based business! I don't know, I drink regular milk even though it's probably bad for me and also it's like pus according to the greatest medical authority of all time, Dr. Will Kirby off of Big Brother.
I hate the labelling on food products too. I hate all the crap they try to sell you about the lives of animals on organic farms when we all know that the USDA organic standards do virtually nothing for the welfare of factory farmed animals. And I hate all the "whole grain" nonsense, which is the same sort of thing - making you feel healthy and virtuous for buying whole-grain whatever when it's really labelled that way because it has about TWO whole grains in it as oppsoed to zero. Grrr!
It makes me want to buy nothing but produce.