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his recommendations would soon become mainstream. He rejected the idea, prevalent in the 1960s, that vigorous exercise was bad for the heart and suggested regular exercise to avoid “heart pollution.” (This led, in the 1980s, to his company founding the very profi table magazines Run-ner’s World and Men’s Health.) He was one of the fi rst “locavores,” advocat-ing eatadvocat-ing locally because of the amount of energy wasted in importadvocat-ing foods from afar. He also condemned excess food packaging for wasting energy and unnecessarily fi lling dump sites. He defi ed the large chorus condemning saturated fats by recommending free-range eggs as “a nat-urally good convenience food.” Such sensible-sounding blends of con-cerns for health, taste, and the environment contributed signifi cantly to mainstream acceptance of natural and organic foods. A 1978 profi le of him in the New York Times portrayed him as much as a concerned envi-ronmentalist as a health food advocate and pointedly avoided labeling him a faddist.⁵²
By then, the Rodales’ batt le to make Americans fearful of chemical food additives was well on its way to being won. Already in 1977 a ma-jority of Americans surveyed thought that “natural foods,” which they understood to mean foods that were free of chemical additives, were safer and more healthful than others. Food processors were now call-ing everythcall-ing from potato chips and breakfast cereals to butt er and beer “Natural,” “Nature’s Own,” and “Nature Valley.” Many claimed to be “additive free,” without saying what was meant by additives. A study of food ads in women’s magazines in 1977 showed that more than a quarter of the products were promoted as “natural,” even though only 2 percent of the products could in any way be defi ned as “health foods.”⁵³
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a steady drift away from science-bashing of the kind that originally un-derlay its Hunzaphilia. By 1990, when Robert Rodale died in a car acci-dent in Russia, the balance of proof in Prevention had shift ed decidedly toward mainstream science.⁵⁵
Robert Rodale’s death left the direction of Rodale Press in the hands of his wife and daughter. They continued Robert Rodale’s drive to turn it into a diversifi ed media empire specializing in health, fi tness, and psychological well-being. In 2000, though, the company hit a bump in the road, and profi ts sagged. An outsider, Steve Murphy, was brought in from Disney Publishing to overhaul the enterprise. There followed the usual staff bloodlett ing. Over 120 old-line editors and employees were forced out, grumbling about the publisher’s abandonment of its “mis-sion.” Within three years, though, the revamped company’s fi nances had been turned around. In 2003 Prevention’s circulation was well over 3 million, and Rodale Press was on its way to becoming the nation’s larg-est publisher of diet and health literature. That year it hit a jackpot with the weight-loss book Th e South Beach Diet, which sold 5 million copies in several months. Then came another best-seller: the autobiography of the disgraced baseball player Pete Rose.⁵⁶ By 2008 Rodale was said to be the largest independent publisher in the United States.
But the disgruntled ex-employees probably had a point. Th e South Beach Diet emphasized eating low-carbohydrate foods, not natural ones, and Pete Rose’s book warned of the dangers of gambling, not processed foods.⁵⁷ In the fi rst half of 2007, the company had ten books on the New York Times best-seller list—including Th e Abs Diet for Women, LL Cool J’s Platinum Workout, and Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth—hardly any of which refl ected J. I. Rodale’s original food concerns and nostrums.⁵⁸ That year it began publishing the wildly successful Eat This Not That series, which told readers which foods were (relatively) healthier in the kind of fast-food and chain restaurants that J. I. Rodale abhorred.⁵⁹ By then, it is doubtful that more than a handful of the over 1,000 people working for Rodale Press had even heard of the Hunza, whose example had so inspired its founder.
By then, as well, the original engine for the myth of the Hunza, J. I.
Rodale’s campaign for “natural foods,” had been almost completely co-opted by the very large agribusinesses and corporations who had been its original targets.⁶⁰ Now, instead of using artifi cial fl avorings to re-place the tastes that are inevitably lost in processing, they used “natural fl avors”—chemical compounds whose diff erences from artifi cial ones
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may be discernible to philosophers of science, but not to anyone else.⁶¹ Practically every kind of foodstuff was now called “natural.” (Tostitos said its corn chips were “Made with All Natural Oil,” leading one to won-der what kind of oil was “unnatural.”) By 2007 Americans were spending
$13 billion a year on “natural foods,” and the market was growing at 4 to 5 percent a year. That year, “all-natural” was the third most popular claim on new food products. The next year, it knocked off fat” and “low-calorie” to become the most popular claim on new foods and beverages.
Although the designation was essentially meaningless, it seemed to reas-sure consumers that the foods contained no hidden dangers.⁶² In eff ect, the food processors were profi ting by exploiting the very fears that their production methods had aroused.
Prevention adapted readily to this, blithely seeking advertisements from the very large processors that J. I. Rodale and his son had condemned so vigorously. They now carried ads for Kashi “natural” cereals and the
“Back to Nature” line of cereals, “process cheese,” and “macaroni and cheese dinner,” neither of whose producers, Kellogg’s and Kraft , identi-fi ed themselves as the products’ manufacturers.⁶³ All of this seemed to provide posthumous support for one of the more compelling concepts of the 1960s radicals: that American capitalism had a remarkable ability to defang opposition by co-opting it—that is, by adopting the rhetoric of radicals’ programs while gutt ing their content.⁶⁴
Equally disturbing for J. I. Rodale’s legacy was that his other great cru-sade, for organic farming, seemed to be heading in the same direction.
As the market for organic foods increased, the business of producing them became dominated by many of the same large corporations who dominated the regular food supply.⁶⁵ Initially, when the federal govern-ment stepped in to regulate use of the term “organic,” there was hope that it would not become as meaningless as “natural.” However, as pressure from these large producers to dilute the defi nition mounted, it seemed that the organic food industry might be headed in a direction that would turn Rodale’s apparent success into a Pyrrhic victory.⁶⁶
On the other hand, had J. I. Rodale lived, as he expected to, until the end of the twentieth century, he would at least have been able to enter
“Hunza” into an Internet search engine and discover that his claims for their health and longevity were still alive and well in the world of alternative medicine and health foods.⁶⁷ And had he lived as long as many of the Hunza were said to and walked into the Whole Foods market in New York’s Time Warner building in August 2007, he might
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have been heartened by what he saw: there stood a prominent display of
“naturally grown” “Himalayan Harvest Organic Hunza Golden Raisins”
and “Hunza Goji Berries,” accompanied by a book called Hunza: 15 Se-crets of the World’s Healthiest and Oldest Living People.⁶⁸ But then again, perhaps not.