Healthy vending machines an oxymoron?

Alexandra Lewin did an extra-curricular project during her doctoral studies in nutrition at Cornell. She tried to get healthier products placed in the department’s junk-food filled vending machines. No doubt you think it would be easy to do something like this, especially in a nutrition department. Wrong. I was an occasional advisor on this project.  All I could do was laugh at what happened and cheer her on.  If you want to understand what it means when public health people like me refer to “deeply entrenched institutional barriers to dietary change,” take a look at her post on Corporations and Health Watch.