With the food industry using tough strategies to push empty calories, advocates for healthy food need to get tough, too, says public health attorney Michele Simon.
By Maureen Turner
In the summer of 2005, the American Beverage Association—the trade group representing the major soda companies—made big news with its announcement that it planned to limit soft drink sales in schools.
The announcement represented a major turnaround for the soda industry, which had been fighting efforts by parent groups and state legislators to put a stop to soda sales in schools in hopes of stemming the alarming rise in childhood obesity. The media largely took the change of heart at face value, reporting the news under headlines like “Soft Drink Industry Takes the High Road.”
Think again. As Michele Simon, a public health attorney based in California, points out in her new book Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back (Nation Books), the new “policy” had about as much substance as a Diet Coke. As a trade association, the ABA lacks the power to force individual soda companies or local distributors to follow the purely voluntary guidelines. And even if the guidelines were adopted, they were full of holes, applying, for instance, to vending machines but not school stores or game concessions.
A second set of guidelines, announced the next year—this time in partnership with the Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association—wasn’t much better; the newer policy, again strictly voluntary, still allowed sales of diet soda and sports drinks.
It doesn’t take a detective to figure out what was in it for the soda companies. They got two major PR boosts, in the process taking the wind out of numerous bills pending in state legislatures to kick soda off school campuses and heading off a major lawsuit that a group of attorneys, including Simon, had been planning. And, in a staggering display of marketing savvy, they managed to do it with the praise of the media and the imprimaturs of both a well-respected medical group and a charitable foundation founded by a former president in part to fight childhood obesity.
It seems self-evident that when it comes to fighting the health crisis caused by the crappy American diet, the major food corporations—the folks that make their living peddling processed foods dripping with sodium and aspartame and high fructose corn syrup—are not exactly on the right side. And yet somehow, Simon points out, “Big Food” manages, time and again, to spin even the most dubious developments to their advantage.
“Have you tried those Whole Grain Chips Ahoy cookies? They are good for you now,” Simon enthuses with well-warranted sarcasm. “Did you realize that Cheetos Jumbo Puffs Flamin’ Hot Cheese Flavored Snacks are trans fat free? Aren’t you relieved that your children are now drinking soft drinks that provide them proper hydration?”
Corporations, Simon points out, can’t reasonably be expected to do the right thing; they’re “fundamentally amoral institution[s]” focused on maximizing profits and—how many times have we heard this one?—fulfilling their fiduciary responsibilities to stockholders. That includes hiring slick PR and marketing professionals who can sell whole-grain Lucky Charms and reduced-sugar Kool Aid (accomplished with the addition of aspartame) as “healthy” alternatives. (“Of course, if you start with crap, anything slightly less crappy can be defined as ‘better for you,’” Simon notes.)
Also on the payroll: scientists-for-hire—some employed at such lofty institutions as Coke’s Beverage Institute for Health and Wellness—whose research, no surprise, yields results favorable to the food companies. And lobbyists with deep pockets and the tenacity of pit bulls, who work behind the scenes to fight off legislative efforts to reduce marketing of junk food to kids, to require restaurants to provide diners with nutritional information, or anything else that might hurt profits.
More dismaying is the evidence Simon offers of the government’s complicity with the food industry. Government programs to encourage “healthier lifestyles” range from the half-assed (like the vague and confusing “food pyramid”) to the absurd, like the “partnership” between the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports and General Mills, makers of such health foods as Haagen Dazs ice cream and Pillsbury slice-and-bake cookies.
Most damaging is the government’s resistance to enforcing tough regulatory standards on food companies, leaving it up to the soda companies and chip makers to decide, for instance, when a product earns the company’s own “healthy” stamp of approval.
Meanwhile, more than 20 states have passed laws banning lawsuits that attempt to hold food companies accountable for the nation’s obesity problem, a move that’s also been pushed in Congress.
“[W]hen government gives corporations public platforms and forms partnerships with them, this conveniently places industry right where it wants to be: in the position of telling the federal government how to make policy while getting the stamp of approval from agency officials for appearing genuine about solving the problem, ensuring unfettered continuation of the status quo,” Simon writes.
Or, more bluntly: “[W]hen it comes to solving the nation’s epidemic of diet-related diseases, Uncle Sam is more aligned with Big Food than with the citizens it’s supposed to represent.”
While Simon makes a persuasive (and frightening, and infuriating) case, she acknowledges that the other side has its own persuasive retort: at the end of the day, individuals are responsible for what they put in their mouths. It’s a powerful line, she concedes, one that appeals to the American ideal of self-determination and personal freedom. Critics like Simon, meanwhile, are cast as the bad guys, “food cops” anxious to control what we eat.
But it’s the food industry, with its pervasive marketing and its ability to influence the government, that’s really in control, counters Simon. And the only way to fight such a major assault on Americans’ health is with a comparable counter-assault. The sort of piecemeal advances made so far are limited in scope and distract from the larger issues, Simon writes: “A campaign aimed at removing soda from school vending machines or trans fat from french fries ? attacks a symptom while failing to treat the disease. We must confront the powerful forces that control our modern food system head-on.”
