Forty-five years ago, Barry Popkin set out to eradicate hunger. He has spent the last 25 years trying to get the world to eat less.
When Pulitzer-Prize winning New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristoff argued that a soda tax would curb obesity and other obesity-related health problems, he went to Barry Popkin, PhD, professor of Global Nutrition at the University of North Carolina, for some back-up. Popkin, who has spent the last three decades following the spread of obesity around the world, did not mince words. “Soft drinks are linked to diabetes and obesity,” he told Kristoff, “in the way that tobacco is to lung cancer.”
That sort of unvarnished critique of the American diet has made Popkin one of the most prolific voices in the war over food, nutrition and obesity. It has also sparked contentious battles with the food and beverage industry.
“I’ve known Barry for well over a decade and we often bump heads,” says Derek Yach, Senior Vice President of Global Health at PepsiCo. “He is one of the leading thinkers in global nutrition but we disagree about the utility of a tax on sodas as the best way to address obesity. He is trying to apply tobacco policies to food.”
“This is a battle like tobacco–only bigger,” Popkin insists. “There’s so much money involved and they’ve learned certain things from tobacco, like funding their own studies to confuse the public.”
Tall and fit, the 66 year-old professor often bikes and walks around Chapel Hill, exhibiting the energy of someone half his age. Over lunch, he rattles off his list of grievances with the food industry, which have only grown over the years. He once blamed the ubiquity of high-fructose corn syrup for increased obesity. He has railed against the promotion of infant formula to the poor and called claims of “heart healthy” products by food manufacturers false advertising. He also declared that red meat is not only bad for human health, but a cancer on the global environment. In his most recent book, The World is Fat: The Fads, Trends, Policies and Products that are Fattening the Human Race, he insists that our lifestyle and food system are at odds with millions of years of evolution and are guaranteed to make us even fatter.
“Academia has given me an amazing platform to make change and have influence, partly because I’m pretty well-known and most people think I’m impartial,” he says.
Popkin first became interested in nutrition in 1965 when he spent a year living in a shantytown in Old Dehli where poverty was pervasive and hunger was the standard. When he returned to the United States, he worked as an organizer for the National Welfare Rights Organization which led him to pursue a doctorate in agricultural economics.
Popkin later worked with the Rockefeller Foundation and served as a consultant to the USAID Regional Development Office in Manila studying mothers who breast-fed or used infant formulas.
Since joining the UNC faculty, he has been the principal investigator for dozens of research projects. That’s when he noticed that even residents of impoverished countries were getting fatter–and sicker. He tracked the escalation of diabetes and heart disease among the poor, the very people he says who can least afford medical care or medicines. During the 1980s, when the bulk of nutrition research focused on hunger, he developed the concept of nutrition transition, when traditional diets are replaced by cheap, processed, sugary and fat laden foods that lead to increased obesity in middle-to-low-income countries. At the time, he was a lonely voice warning of the looming worldwide obesity epidemic.
“Today, there is not a single third-world country that doesn’t have at least 10 percent of adult women who are overweight and obese–even in what we think of as the world’s poorest countries,” he says.
In recent years, Popkin has taken a less confrontational approach to dealing with the food industry, choosing instead to find areas where they agree. In 2007, he started an annual Global Obesity Business Forum with senior executives from food, beverage and infant formula companies to find a solution to the obesity epidemic. He is also working on the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, a consortium of food giants including Kellogg, General Mills, Coca-Cola and Kraft that has set goals for making their products more health conscious.
He focuses much of his private time working with countries including Mexico and China to help make their food supply healthier. “I’m much more successful in other countries than in the United States,” he says. “We have 24 senators with us on a bill to get certain sugary beverages out of the schools but Pepsi brought in a slew of lobbyist to fight it. I lose many battles but you can’t see the problems I see and not try to change things.”
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