Abstract
Recognizing the importance of nutrition as part of the grand challenges faced by humanity—the current epidemic of non-communicable diseases (NCDs), sustainability and maintenance of Planetary Health—the United Nations (UN) has declared 2016–2025 the Decade of Nutrition. Research continues to underscore the extent to which ultra-processed foods dominate the contemporary nutritional landscape. Moreover, the dual role played by food technology and marketing in the expansion of ultra-processed foods is under increased scrutiny. As public health experts and clinicians contend with a crisis of NCDs, attempting to untangle a knotted assortment of interrelated strands of causation, an examination of the early origins of highly-marketed ultra-processed foods can provide valuable lessons. Here, we illuminate a little-known piece of history in the annals of ultra-processed nutritional science and childhood welfare. Astrofood was a commercially-marketed, collaborative government-industry effort that brought soy protein-enriched Twinkies as a nutritive breakfast cake to disadvantaged children; its concept and delivery demonstrated an unwillingness to deal with root-cause challenges. Although its official tenure was only about 7 years, we argue that Astrofood and its total food engineering still resonate throughout the global ultra-processed nutritional landscape. New scientific advances in nutritional psychiatry and the microbiome are on a collision course with the profits, marketing and intellectual dishonesty of the ultra-processed food industry. Solutions to the grand challenges of the Decade of Nutrition may be found in lessons from Astrofood. They provide clues to undoing the tangled knots which otherwise maintain an untenable status quo.
Highlights
FLAME Global Network, Research Group of the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN), 6010 Park Ave, Paediatrics, School of Medicine, University of Western Australia, P.O
In our perspective review, we will discuss the nutritional formulation of Astrofood and place its historical development and continued legacy in the contemporary context of a nutritional landscape dominated by highly-processed foods, corporate-public health campaigns intertwined with profits, and an epidemic of non-communicable diseases (NCDs)
In the context of environmental justice, we ask, what are the societal costs of ignoring or providing only minimal investments toward exploring the science of nutrition for mental health, and to what extent inequalities—nutritional and otherwise—are engineered? To what extent does intellectual dishonesty and escapism burden the channels of food technology as it pertains to the defense of ultra-processed foods? Answers to such questions are a critical part of the grand challenge set forth by the United Nations in its recently declared Decade of Action on Nutrition (2016–2025) [12]
Summary
“We achieve what nature could not do.” Robert H. In his own words, Koenig describes the origins in clear terms: “We wanted to devise a food that was cheap and easy to handle. Los Angeles Times to Ebony and Black Enterprise, ITT told a more nuanced story of the intellectual wellspring for Astrofood [7,8,9]. They claimed the product was in response to the challenges set forth at the White House Conference on Food, Nutrition and Health which was held 2–4 December 1969. Cotton of ITT was on the panel devoted to systems of delivery for food, which recommended “research on new foods, especially nutritional snacks, which could be introduced through the schools but which might have an impact on the whole population” [10]
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