The absurdity of our civilization’s extreme relationship with food hit me like a runaway snowboard while watching the Ozempic Olympics earlier this year, in between commercials advertising pizza and French fries.
The relentless marketing, alternately promoting weight loss drugs and foods that lean toward making us fat, wasn’t aimed at the elite athletes strutting their stuff on the world stage. It’s a safe bet they didn’t achieve the peak of human fitness on a diet of pizza and french fries. It’s equally doubtful they require injections of the GLP-1 class of drugs to manage their weight.
Nope, those commercials are aimed at the couch potatoes back home, subjecting us to both temptation and a shortcut to redemption as we bear witness to these feats of human endurance.
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These athletes deserve our admiration and respect, but to be fair to the rest of us, most working stiffs don’t have the time, the drive or the resources to devote full-time to the pursuit of extreme fitness.
So we’re left swinging between food-culture extremes, the effects of which filter back through the food chain to the farm. Consider for a moment how the food industry is twisting itself into a pretzel trying to understand how these drugs will affect consumer demand.
Firstly, these products reduce appetites, which means people eat less — so much so that it’s more difficult for them to meet their nutritional needs. It’s also now known that one of the unintended consequences of rapid weight loss is a loss of muscle.
Lately, the focus has shifted to how to support consumers in their post-GLP-1 phase as users move away from the drugs due to factors such as costs or side effects. Recent studies are indicating the weight they lost bounces back four times faster than weight lost through traditional diet and exercise.
That has shifted attention to creating low-calorie, nutrient-dense foods, with a particular emphasis on protein.
How does this affect farmers’ bottom line? Some analysts have pointed to the protein craze as one reason record-high beef prices haven’t had the same dampening effect on demand that they might have in the past.
It’s also creating some longer-term shifts in pricing and production.
A recent Farm Credit Canada analysis outlined how this plays out for dairy farmers, to cite one example. A decade ago, they were told they needed to produce milk with a higher proportion of butterfat, which led to shifts in pricing, genetics and feeding strategies to accommodate.
Now, demand is tipping back to protein, leading marketing boards to once again adjust pricing formulas to incentivise a higher ratio of protein in the milk supply. Change comes at a cost, and those costs eventually find their way into the price of food.
“Does this protein craze have staying power? It will take years and successive generations of breeding to shift the herd towards higher-protein-lower butterfat-producing animals,” FCC economist Graeme Crosbie asked in his article.
That’s a good question. Looking back over the countless extreme approaches grabbing headlines in recent generations — the Atkins Diet, keto, low-fat, high-fat, cabbage, carnivore, meatless, vegan, California, intermittent fasting, anti-ultra processed — to name a few — many have caused food-sector pivots, but ultimately, most had limited staying power.
Remember the Atkins Diet of the early 2000s? Industry statistics show that at its peak, pasta consumption dropped eight per cent and bread by up to 40 per cent.
Meanwhile, food manufacturers responded with a major investment in hundreds of low-carb food products, many of which flourished only briefly.
The jury is still out on the plant-based protein craze, touted as healthier for people and the planet. However, many of the early plant-based products are languishing in the marketplace because of their high cost and blah taste. That industry is reportedly regrouping in a bid to up the flavour profile and rebalance costs.
There are already signs that the GLP-1 drugs are losing their shine. They no doubt still have a place but many are discovering they aren’t the panacea those advertisements make them out to be.
Farmers busy with the day-to-day business of growing food ingredients can’t afford to farm the fads. But it’s still wise to monitor these changing consumer behaviours to find the common threads — such as protein, nutrition and a move away from ultra-processed foods.
Understanding how the middle ground between the different extremes might be shifting gives farmers the upper hand when making strategic investments in their operations.
