COLUMN: Pizza: Part of a healthy lunch?

Next time you’re walking through the Muenster University Center, looking for a vegetable to fill out your healthy meal, consider a slice of pizza. According to a recently passed bill by Congress, pizza is now a vegetable.

In order to receive federal assistance, school lunch programs have to meet certain nutritional standards. Allowing pizza to count as a serving of vegetables, in Republican lawmakers’ words, “prevent[s] overly burdensome and costly regulations and… provide[s] greater flexibility for local school districts to improve the nutritional quality of meals.”

Lawmakers are defending local schools against an overbearing federal government. How noble. In reality, though, this is just another ploy to protect the food industry’s interests in peddling junk food to  our schoolchildren.

Republican lawmakers argue that it’s not the federal government’s place to tell children what to eat. In other words, it’s the old “consumer choice” line — regulations limit the ability of consumers to decide for themselves. As we all know, kids love pizza. So what right does the government have to tell them, “Sorry, you can’t eat that, have some broccoli instead?”

Kids’ love for foods like pizza and french fries is not really a matter of choice. A 2010 study in the journal “Nature Neuroscience” found that foods like these — high in salt, fat, and sugar — elicit responses from the brain practically indistinguishable from those elicited by addictive drugs like heroine. In other words, we are naturally addicted to  unhealthy foods.

This has to do with our evolutionary history. In a natural environment where fat, sugar and salt were all scarce, early hunter-gatherers developed something like an addiction to those nutrients. That way, whenever we came upon a berry bush or a fatty antelope carcass, we would instinctively eat as much as possible, since we could never be sure how long it would be until we had another opportunity to bulk up.

On the savanna, this addictive relationship to food makes sense. But today, when we have 24/7 access to foods artificially pumped full of fat, salt and sugar, what was once an evolutionary advantage turns into a huge handicap. Hopefully, by the time we become mature adults, we have learned how to control our natural cravings. But children are not developed enough, either cognitively or physically, to practice adult levels of self-control.

The food industry preys on our natural addictions. Chances are that pizza manufacturers are not intentionally out to make our children obese, but fat is what sells. In a free market, the pursuit of profit is the only justification  one needs.

In the same vein, government regulations requiring healthier meals threatens profits for companies that make pizza, french fries and other unhealthy foods. Unsurprisingly enough, the recent changes to nutritional standards were introduced at the behest of those very  same companies.

To those who counter that it’s ultimately the parent’s responsibility to ensure their kids eat  healthily, 68.3 percent of American adults are overweight or obese,

according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

Maybe parents should have more willpower, but they are human beings with the same hardwired cravings as their children. They’re being taken advantage of just the same.

With so many overweight adults, we are beginning to see the impact dietary choices have on society at large. According to the CDC, heart disease, which is largely related to lifestyle factors, is the leading cause of death in America. Moreover, heart disease cost the U.S. $316.4 billion in 2010 in medical costs and lost productivity, not to mention upwards of 600,000 deaths.

I do not solely blame the food industry for obesity and heart disease. Things are never that simple. But I recognize that they play a role.

We are not just talking about the right of individuals to choose what goes into their bodies, or of school districts to choose what they feed our children — which all too often means whatever happens to be the cheapest. In other words, unhealthy

pseudo-food.

We are also talking about the right not to be preyed upon by market and biological forces beyond our control. I contend it actually is the government’s place to establish guidelines for schools in order to protect children from those selfsame forces, seeing as how there are no direct democratic controls on the food industry.

Doing so protects society members either directly, by preventing the loss of a loved one to heart disease, or indirectly, by lowering healthcare costs.

So as you head home for Thanksgiving this year, make sure to get plenty of real vegetables — and have some pizza too, if you like. But remember, just because Congress says something is a vegetable, doesn’t make it so.