Thanks to Erica Lade for sending the poster and these links to articles connecting Occupy Wall Street to the Food Movement:
And in case you missed this week’s New Yorker:
Join the food movement!
The Institute of Medicine (IOM) just released its second report on front-of-package (FOP) labeling. It tells FDA to allow only four items in any front-of-package evaluation scheme:
To display this, the IOM committee recommends a point system based on levels of saturated and trans fats, sodium, and sugars for evaluating food products. The points are to be indicated with check marks or stars. Here is an example of how stars might be used to indicate products that qualify for zero, one, two, or three points.
I’m guessing that anything this clear and understandable will elicit storms of protest.
Recall that food companies have been setting their own nutrition criteria for evaluating their very own products and identifying the “better-for-you” or “more nutritious” products with special front-of-package logos. By company standards, many of their products qualify for the logos.
To deal with the multiplicity and absurdity of such schemes, the FDA asked the IOM to take a look at the various FOP logos that were out there and recommend how to clean up the mess. The first IOM report said the FDA should allow FOP labels to state only calories, saturated and trans fat, and sodium, but not sugars (this last was a mistake, I thought).
But—while the FDA was waiting for the IOM to produce its next report, the Grocery Manufacturers Association (GMA) and Food Marketing Institute (FMI) jumped the gun. Their preemptive logo included “positive” nutrients such as vitamins and fiber along with the “negatives.” This scheme is already in use on food packages.
The IOM committee was faced with an impossibly difficult task: to come up with a front-of-package scheme that would reduce the overall nutritional quality of processed foods to the sum of a few key factors.
Given strong industry marketing pressures to retain front-of-package labels—and the lack of an option to remove them altogether—the committee did the best it could with an inherently bad idea.
Why a bad idea? FOP labels are a tool for selling, not buying. They make highly processed foods look healthier, whether or not they really are.
And whether slightly better-for-you processed foods assessed by this method will help anyone to make better food choices and to be healthier remains open questions.
Nevertheless, the IOM proposal is a huge improvement over what food companies are now doing. I consider it courageous.
Why courageous? Because the scheme makes it so easy to distinguish products that qualify for the various point levels.
For example, here are some products that qualify for stars:
Examples of products that do not qualify:
I can’t wait to see the GMA and FMI press release on this report.
And the FDA must now take this report under consideration to begin its interminable rulemaking process.
Why, you might ask, does any of this matter? Aren’t questions about what food companies put on package labels basically trivial? Don’t FOP label fights divert attention from other, more important food issues?
Maybe, but I see this as a test of the FDA’s authority to regulate and set limits on any kind of food industry behavior. If the FDA cannot mandate a label that might help consumers choose healthier food options or refuse to permit labels that mislead consumers, it means the public has little recourse against any kind of corporate power.
I think this matters, and I’ll bet food companies do too.
And now, sit back and watch the lobbying begin!
That did not take long: Here’s the GMA press release—fairly tame all things considered:
The Institute of Medicine’s Committee on Examination of Front-of-Package Nutrition Rating Systems and Symbols report adds a perspective to the national dialogue about front-of-pack nutrition labeling. In the meantime, food and beverage companies have developed a real-world program that delivers real value to real consumers in real time.
Consumers have told us that they want simple and easy to use information and that they should be trusted to make decisions for themselves and their families. The most effective programs are those that consumers embrace, and consumers have said repeatedly that they want to make their own judgments, rather than have government tell them what they should and should not eat. That is the guiding principle of Facts Up Front, and why we have concerns about the untested, interpretive approach suggested by the IOM committee.
My translation: Consumers prefer to have the food industry’s “Facts Up Front” tell them what to eat? I don’t think so.
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This morning, the Center for Digital Democracy announced that consumer groups have filed a complaint (and see the appendices) with the Federal Trade Commission against PepsiCo.
Why? Because of the ways PepsiCo uses digital marketing techniques to push its products to children and adolescents.
These include:
The report points to Pepsi’s Hotel 626 video game as a particularly egregious example.
Also this morning, Public Health Law & Policy released a comprehensive report on the kinds of digital marketing tactics that are now used routinely by fast food, snack food, and soft drink companies. The report identifies specific marketing campaigns from PepsiCo, McDonald’s, and others that exploit kids’ use of digital media.
I can’t wait to see what the FTC does with this.
In the meantime, here’s Michele Simon’s enlightening report on what it’s like to play Hotel 626.
And Lori Dorfman of the Berkeley Media Studies Group sends these case studies on digital marketing to kids:
The Washington Legal Foundation (WLF) placed an ad in yesterday’s New York Times.
The ad continues:
Paternalistic plaintiffs’ lawyers, government officials, and professional activists are pecking away at consumers’ freedom of choice. They think we can’t manage our own lives, and through lawsuits, regulations, and taxes, they want to make our food choices for us—while profiting handsomely in the process. If we let these New Prohibitionists eat off our plates today, what other personal freedoms will they target tomorrow?
Help us defend consumer choice at EatingAwayOurFreedoms.org.
The website lists cigarette companies as clients:
The Washington Legal Foundation advocates for a free market economy, a common sense legal system, a transparent and accountable government, and a strong national defense. Our legal team shapes legal policy through aggressive litigation and advocacy at all levels of the judiciary and the policy-making arena.
Aggressive? Clearly.
I’m not familiar with this group. Could it possibly be connected to the Center for Consumer Freedom?
If you know anything about the WLF, do tell.
Addition, October 19: Thanks to readers for the enlightening comments. One sent this document, in which WLF explains its mission.
If consumer protection were the real goal [of consumer advocates], then special interest ideologues would applaud businesses’ vigorous self-regulation of their advertising, and advocate viable, non-censorship solutions such as increased enforcement of underage drinking laws and more education on healthy food.
Instead of dumbing down America through activism, why not focus our efforts on real problems we face and produce drugs and vaccines to deal with pandemics, bioterrorism, and cancer. These are critical challenges that make the radical causes of self-anointed consumer advocates look petty and hopelessly irrelevant.
Reversing childhood obesity is a radical cause? I’m for it!
It’s the fall book season and the food books are pouring in. Here are five good ones, so recent that some have 2012 publication dates.
Michael Carolan, The Real Cost of Cheap Food, Earthscan 2011: The chapter titles, all of which start with Cheap Food, tell the story: Globalization and Development, Conflict, Hunger and Obesity, Meat, The Environment, But at What Price, Community and Culture, and Who Wins. The conclusion is Making Food Affordable. How? Eat less meat, don’t grow food for fuel, support urban agriculture, and other such excellent ideas.
Colin Sage, Environment and Food, Routledge, 2012: A beautifully designed and well written examination of every possible way in which food interacts with the environment. It focuses on global food systems and their challenges and what we need to do to make the systems more sustainable.
Per Pinstrup-Anderson P and Derrill D. Watson II, Food Policy for Development Countries: The Role of Government in Global, National, and Local Food Systems, Cornell University Press, 2011: A serious look at how global food policies affect nutrition and health, poverty and food insecurity, and domestic markets, and the effects of all this on managing natural resources and climate change. The book ends with a chapter on ethical aspects of food systems: “Investments in national and international public goods, particularly infrastructure and agricultural research developed for smallholders, are critical elements in supporting pro-poor economic growth and achieving their human rights.”
Madeleine Pullman and Zhaohui Wu, Food Supply Chain Management: Economic, Social and Environmental Perspectives, Routledge, 2012: A textbook for an undergraduate course but well worth a look for its analyses of how commodity food chains work, trends toward vertical integration, and the way supply chains are or are not regulated: “Many agree that the current system and trends have created a formidable force against the emergence of alternative food systems—particularly one that considers economic, environmental and social attributes simultaneously.” Desirable foods supply chains would do better for consumers, farm workers, and the environment, and would be a whole lot more sustainable.
Alan Bjerga, Endless Appetities: How the Commodities Casino Creates Hunger and Unrest, Bloomberg Press, 2011: Food prices are rising to the point of international crisis. Based on the author’s personal visits to farmers around the world, Bjerga explains how the crisis happened (short answer: greed), its tragic effects, and what now has to be done to reverse them.
Every now and then something brings home what climate change could do to us: no chocolate!
Researchers in Colombia predict that the 1 degree rise in world temperatures expected by 2030 will hit small cocoa farmers in West Africa. particularly hard. Farmers in Ghana and Cote d-Ivoire produce half the world’s cocoa.
The 2 degree rise expected by 2050 will make it impossible for them to grow the plants at current elevations.
Now that’s something to worry about over the weekend, no?
A study released yesterday reports that so-called “better-for-you” (BFY) foods (those low in salt and sugar, high in fiber or with added vitamins, for example) may account for only about 40% of company sales, but they account for more than 70% of growth in sales.
Hudson Institute, October 2011
According to the press release accompanying the report, companies that sell BFY products “record stronger sales growth, higher operating profits, superior shareholder returns, and better company reputations than companies that sell fewer BFY products.”
The public health implications? According to the report:
I emphasize the third one because it sounds so much like a veiled threat.
I think it means that if public health officials want the food industry to make healthier food products, they better let food companies market their products any way they like:
Or else.
Or else what? Just watch what the food industry will do (and is doing) whenever public health officials try to restrict advertising to children or demand that that companies put nutritional “negatives” on front-of-package labels.
Here’s CNN Health’s account (I’m quoted) and the one in the Wall Street Journal (I’m not).
Two studies released this week provide additional evidence that vitamin supplements are potentially harmful and, at the very least, do no good.
This depressing news comes from the Iowa Women’s Health Study. Older women in the study who took supplements ranging from multivitamins to high doses of single nutrients had a greater risk of dying than those who did not.
Equally depressing are the results of a trial of high-dose vitamin E and selenium versus prostate cancer. It found higher rates of the cancer among men taking vitamin E (selenium was somewhat protective). In this trial, it was so obvious that the supplements did not protect against prostate cancer that the investigators ended it before its scheduled date of completion.
USA Today interviewed me and Dr. Jeffrey Blumberg (Tufts University) about our interpretations of these trials.
I think that the main conclusion to be drawn from this research is that supplements do not make healthy people healthier. They may not cause harm at high doses, but they appear not to do good.
I don’t take them and I don’t recommend them—except to people who have diagnosed nutrient deficiencies or other problems handling nutrients.
Dr. Blumberg, in contrast, thinks multivitamins constitute a useful nutrition insurance policy and everybody should be taking them.
Supplements are a good example of how scientists can interpret research in different ways, depending on point of view. I illustrate this point in Food Politics in a table in which I compare what I call “belief-based” (for lack of a better term) and “science-based” approaches to deciding whether supplements are needed, effective, or safe (see table 29, page 232).
For example, on the need for supplements, a belief-based approach rests on:
A science-based approach considers:
The statements in both approaches are true.
This is why point of view is such an important consideration in interpretation of nutrition research.
This session is on Practicing Food Studies. It will be at 5;00 p.m. Details to come.