Today in Oak Brook, Illinois the world’s most well-recognized purveyor of unhealthy food will hold its annual shareholders’ meeting. Usually a forum to showcase profits made at the expense of the public’s health, food advocates and health professionals will be giving the burger giant’s dog and pony show pause.

For a second straight year, shareholders will vote on a resolution requiring McDonald’s to publicly assess its impacts on the nation’s health. The resulting report would, no doubt, be damning. After all, no fast food corporation sells more high-fat, -salt, -sugar, and -calorie junk food worldwide. No fast food corporation spends more marketing its unhealthy offerings. And perhaps no food corporation has had a greater impact on how we eat or how food is grown.

As Fast Food Nation author Eric Schlosser puts it: even if you don’t eat McDonald’s-style fast food “you’re eating food produced by the same system.” In other words, McDonald’s, as the nation’s leading purchaser of staples like beef, pork, and potatoes, isn’t just putting unhealthy food on plastic trays, it’s shaping the unhealthy methods by which its produced. Factory farms, the overuse of pesticides–you name it–McDonald’s is in some way behind it, including the harm to animals, our drinking water, the environment, and our health an externality.

That’s why this first-of-its-kind resolution is so groundbreaking. It would give us a sense of what a Big Mac and fries truly costs. Not only that, it would give shareholders a sense of the financial risk the corporation could ultimately face for continuing to saddle the public with its externalized costs.

As recently documented in AdAge, McDonald’s brand image is out of sync with sales, with McDonald’s consistently ranking near the bottom of its industry in quality perception. Analysts warn if this trend continues the pendulum could well swing for the corporation’s profitability.

Dr. Andrew Bremer, a pediatric endocrinologist and professor of pediatrics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, will speak to these points at the meeting. He is part of a growing network of more than 2500 health professionals  that are partnering with my organization, Corporate Accountability International, to compel industry-leader McDonald’s to change course as the corporation’s leadership changes hands. CEO Jim Skinner will be stepping down this month, with COO Don Thompson stepping in.

Corporate Accountability International and partners like Dr. Bremer see no reason to wait for the results of the resolution-sanctioned report to come in for the new CEO to reduce the corporation’s “health footprint.” For one, there is a growing body of research, including a recent Institute of Medicine study, highlighting the importance of limiting junk food marketing to children and adolescents in reducing disease rates. To this end the network has called for McDonald’s to stop marketing junk food to kids, helping compel the American Academy of Pediatrics to take an even more strident stance–an outright ban on junk food marketing to kids.

And most recently, the network called on hospital administrators to give McDonald’s franchises the boot. Cleveland Clinic led the charge–affirming it would not renew McDonald’s contract. A study in the journal Pediatrics has found that citing fast food in health care settings earns brands like McDonald’s an undeserved association with healthfulness. Needless to say, McDonald’s has long built brand loyalty by nutriwashing its image–a practice that needs to stop.

Grassroots pressure is only building. Since the initial introduction of the resolution at last year’s meeting, McDonald’s has made changes to its Happy Meals and competitors have scaled back their marketing to kids.

As these things go, resolutions are not expected to pass over the opposition of the Board. But bringing it to the floor before shareholders will again put the corporation on notice, compelling CEO Thompson to lend a more sympathetic ear to the concerns of health care providers and Civil Eats readers like you.

Click here to call on hospital administrators to give McDonald’s the boot.
Click here to call on McDonald’s CEO to stop marketing junk food to kids.

Corporate Accountability International (formerly Infact) is a membership organization that has, for the last 35 years, successfully advanced campaigns protecting health, the environment and human rights. Value [the] Meal is Corporate Accountability International’s campaign dedicated to reversing the global epidemic of diet-related disease by challenging the fast food industry to curb a range of abuses.

To call McDonald’s latest advertising campaign aimed at children cynical doesn’t give enough credit to the fast food giant and its ad agency, Leo Burnett. The company says the new series of ads starting this month is part of McDonald’s “nutrition commitment to promote nutrition and/or active lifestyle messages in 100 percent of its national communications to kids.”

How will the purveyor of Big Macs, fries and Coke accomplish this lofty goal? Perhaps by explaining that McDonald’s is an occasional treat? Or that sharing home-cooked meals is one of the best ways for families to ensure good eating habits? Perhaps McDonald’s could educate kids about the federal MyPlate recommendations to make half your meal fruits and vegetables?

Not even close. McDonald’s idea of nutrition education is simple: just eat at McDonald’s.

In the first animated ad, a child’s pet goat is derided for eating everything in sight, from the kid’s baseball to his father’s hair. The solution? The goat needs a “better diet,” defined by fruit and dairy the ad says—but where to find such strange items? Jump in the car and head to McDonald’s, where the goat becomes “strong as an ox” from downing the apple slices and chocolate milk contained in Happy Meals. The ad ends with the goat chomping on the Happy Meals box. (Apparently, the goat does not eat the child’s toy.)

Problem solved.

The message sent to children? Everything at home is bad to eat. The place to find healthy food is at McDonald’s. In a matter of seconds, McDonald’s manages to circumscribe the entire universe of healthy foods to the two items found in a Happy Meal, all under the guise of “nutrition education.” You can’t get much more twisted than that.

For McDonald’s “balanced eating” is accomplished within the confines of the Happy Meal. But apple slices and chocolate milk don’t balance out chicken nuggets and French fries, the other two components of the Happy Meal depicted in the ad. (Moreover, by most nutrition standards apples and chocolate milk are actually treats, not staples of a healthy diet in a way that broccoli is, for example.)

Even if the ad campaign was less self-serving and actually attempted to educate children about healthful eating in a meaningful way, this is not McDonald’s job.

I don’t know any critic of McDonald’s that has been begging the company to “to promote nutrition and/or active lifestyle messages” to children. Quite the opposite: We want McDonald’s to stop targeting children, period. Stop using toys to lure children, stop promoting Ronald McDonald in schools and communities, and stop marketing to children as young as age two online at websites like Ronald.com, McWorld.com, andHappyMeal.com. We want McDonald’s to just get out of the way to let parents do their job to teach children how to eat right.

Notably, in its press release announcing the new campaign, McDonald’s felt compelled to reassure the public: “Ronald McDonald will continue to be an ambassador of happiness and joy for children of all ages in ongoing McDonald’s advertising and local community programs.”

That’s a relief, because I was really worried that goat was taking over.

With this new campaign, McDonald’s is making a desperate attempt to silence its critics by appearing to care about children’s health. But what the fast food giant has actually accomplished is yet one more way to exploit children’s emotional vulnerabilities through the use of animals and cartoons.

And parents, your job to help your kids eat right just got even harder.

Please sign this letter urging McDonald’s CEO Jim Skinner to stop marketing children.

Originally published on Appetite for Profit

Dr. Marion Nestle and Dr. Malden Nesheim’s Why Calories Count: From Science to Politics, is not a diet book selling you on the newest trend nor does it encourage you to count calories. Instead it does the seemingly impossible: It takes calories from the abstract to the concrete. Nestle and Nesheim explain the significance of the calorie not only in understandable scientific terms, but also in social terms with the explicit aim of helping their reader navigate the convoluted world of food labels and diet fads.

Nestle and Nesheim address frequently asked calorie-related questions like: Is there such a thing as negative calories and are some calories good and others bad? Chapters titles like “What is a Calorie?” belie the complex nature of the subject, but despite their respective PhD’s in molecular biology (Nestle) and nutrition (Nesheim) they manage to make the science of the calorie a personal and ultimately relatable subject.

And, not unlike Michael Pollan’s “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” mantra, Nestle and Nesheim leave us with four simple charges when it comes to calories: “Get organized. Eat less. Move more. Get political.”

I spoke with Nestle about her motives behind writing the book, the impossibility of estimating calories by sight, and the reason she got into this field in the first place.

Why did you decide to write a book about calories?

Well actually this came through an invite from the University of California Press. I wish I could say it was my idea, but it wasn’t. My editor at UC Press took me to lunch at one point and said he wanted me to do two things—one was to update Safe Food (2003) and the other was to write a book about calories. I thought it was a brilliant idea. It was so current since nobody seems to know what to do about obesity and there are huge debates about what you’re supposed to eat to maintain a healthy weight. There’s so much misunderstanding with calories especially since, as we say in the book, you can’t see them, smell them, or taste them.

What was the aim of Why Calories Count?

As we say in the introduction to the first chapter, if you just stay with the science, it will pay off later on. Because if you understand the stuff in the beginning [the history and the science] all the rest of it, all of the arguments about diet make sense and you can evaluate it on your own. We were trying to empower people to interpret the food environment around them. We don’t think you need any complicated explanations for weight gain beyond extra calories

You and Malden Nesheim collaborated on an earlier book called Feed Your Pet Right (2010). Since you’ve decided to tackle another project I assume you must work well together…

Yes. I knew that this book was not something I was going to be able to do by myself because the scientific background that’s needed to understand this goes really deep and the thought of reviewing all of that stuff on my own gave me a headache. So I asked Mal to help me and he agreed. Our strengths complement each other really well.

You write that the book explores calories through science and politics. Why both?

We thought that if people were going to understand what’s out there in society then they need to understand the science. If people want to manage their weight they need to learn how to manage the environment and that’s not so easy. I used to see this in our department at NYU when we were still in the space with the kitchen. There was food around all the time. Every new member gained weight and they had to learn how to manage it. Because it is a Nutrition Department everyone did learn how to deal with it, but it required a lot of thought to figure it out.

What calorie-related questions do you get most often?

People always ask us if we count calories. Absolutely not. I think you have to work with portion sizes. The other big question that everyone has is does it matter what you eat?  The answer is yes and no. Strictly for weight gain it’s no. Strictly for health yes. But if you are eating a healthy diet it is so much easier to control your weight.

One of my favorite examples of underestimating calories in restaurant food in the book was from an anecdote you tell about a New York Times reporter taking you and several other nutritionists out to lunch and asking you to estimate the number of calories in your dishes. Despite the fact that you were all nutritionists, you still found it hard to estimate the calories in the food and ended up underestimating by about 30 percent.

It’s impossible to estimate. It was inconceivable to me that a little dish of risotto had 1,200 calories—how is that possible? I was on an airplane with a bunch of chefs the day the article came out, which was quite humiliating. The chefs said I obviously didn’t know anything about being in a restaurant kitchen and they were right.

Let’s talk about the increase in portion sizes.

Once you get used to large portions you cant go back. People feel like they’re cheated. Mini bagels are the size of bagels I grew up with and mini muffins are the size of what a normal muffin used to be. Larger muffins have more calories, sometimes many more. I don’t think it’s anything more complicated than that.

I once went to a meeting of restaurant chain owners and said that I would really like them to give a price break for smaller portions. They said, “what are you trying to do put us out of business?” For them it’s a matter of life and death. Large portions sell.

You briefly mention the controversial front-of-package nutritional labels in the book. Do you support any version of these?

Oh no. I’m on record that there shouldn’t be any labels or health claims on the front of packages at all. If there has to be one then I would advocate for calories of the whole package. Calories-per-serving is a huge source of confusion.

In the introduction you call yourselves “consummate foodies,” which is not a label people necessarily associate with nutritionists…

My love of food is the reason I go interested in all of this. In High School a friend of my mother’s was a cookbook collector and oh how I wish I had her collection. She told me if I liked food then I should study it. But the options then were either agriculture or dietetics and since I’m a city girl [Nestle grew up in New York City] I never considered agriculture. It took me decades to find out how much agriculture had to do with what we eat on a daily basis.

So I went to Berkeley as a dietetics major and lasted exactly one day. It was not a happy experience for me.  I ended up being a science major and didn’t get back to food until many years later when I was given a nutrition course to teach. It was like falling in love. I was in a biology department and I could see that it was the perfect way to teach undergrad bio. Cell biology made everyone’s eyes glaze over, but nutrition made everyone perk up and start talking. I loved that you could go from science to politics in just one lecture. Everything you were doing in the science department was reflected in the culture and society. I figured that out on the first day I was doing research for the course and I never looked back.

Critics of the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP (previously known as food stamps) claim some recipients are wrongly receiving benefits after winning lottery jackpots. SNAP fraud is serious. Those who are not in need and improperly receive benefits are taking precious resources from people desperate to feed their families in our slowly healing economy. Thankfully, according to the US Department of Agriculture, SNAP fraud is limited.

SNAP funding is authorized under the federal farm bill. The Senate agriculture committee is crafting its version of the bill in the coming weeks. A hearing on the commodity title–farm subsidies–is scheduled for Wednesday.

So here’s our question:  would critics of SNAP exhibit the same level of outrage if they learned that several Roby, Texas, cotton farmers shared a $46 million dollar jackpot in 1996 and still receive hundreds of thousands of dollars apiece in federal subsidies for years after?

From the December 8, 1996, edition of the Houston Chronicle:

Forget the silk shirts, Cuban cigars and $12,000 cases of Chateau Latour. Park those dreams of a Mercedes S-600 coupe at the curb. This tiny West Texas farm town’s newly minted millionaires–winners of the Thanksgiving-eve $46 million Texas Lottery–have more pressing concerns: paying bills and picking cotton.

Down at Terry’s Gin, the town’s social center and birthplace of the successful lottery pool, the 43 winners last week signed papers that will transform them from financially strapped, sweat-stained sons of the soil to solidly middle-class farmers and agribusinessmen with a bounce in their step and a jingle in their pockets.

The “Roby 43” and their lottery win is an uplifting tale–and we don’t begrudge them their good fortune. But in the context of the ongoing debate of food stamp eligibility, five members of the cotton-farming Terry family won the lottery and also received federal farm subsidies between 1997 and 2010 in these amounts:

Mike Terry – lottery winner in 1996 and a recipient of $1,120,236 in federal farm subsidies from 1997-2010.

Gene Terry – lottery winner in 1996 and a recipient of $353, 591 in federal farm subsidies from 1997-2010.

Vernon Terry – lottery winner in 1996 and a recipient of $401,164 in federal farm subsidies from 1997-2010.

Jeremy Terry – lottery winner in 1996 and a recipient of  $325,366 in federal farm subsidies from 1997-2010.

Jo Ann Terry – lottery winner in 1996 and a recipient of $592, 070 in federal farm subsidies from 1997-2010.

If this strikes you as odd, welcome to the upside-down world of the farm subsidy system of gross inequities and deep unfairness. While farm income has been setting records year after year, the largest agribusinesses have taken in the bulk of subsidy payments. And in a budget crisis, millions of taxpayer dollars still go to well-off landowners and investors living in American cities like New York, Miami, Chicago, and San Francisco–far removed from farm country.

And while the 2008 farm bill lowered the income limit for farm subsidies, the level is still hundreds of thousands of dollars higher than the income of an average American. According to USDA the new rules are:

For direct payments, a person or legal entity with adjusted farm gross income of over $750,000, averaged over previous 3 years, is not eligible.

For direct payments, counter-cyclical payments, average crop revenue election, marketing loan gains or loan deficiency payments, noninsured crop assistance, milk income loss contract program payments, or disaster assistance payments or benefits, a person or entity with average adjusted gross nonfarm income in excess of $500,000 is not eligible.

The AGI limits for farm subsidies can be doubled for a married couple, so they can earn up to $1.5 million in farm income and $1 million in off-farm income.

Between 2003 and 2006, USDA made subsidy payments to 2,702 farm operations exceeding the means test, according to the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional watchdog agency. Most of those recipients actually lived in cities. One was an insurance company executive.  Another owned part of a professional sports franchise.

Between 2006 and 2009, taxpayers reporting $1 million or more in net farm income received more than $283 million in farm program payments, according to a recent analysis by Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK). And no matter how large or profitable the farm, taxpayers now are obligated to subsidize the premium on as much “crop insurance” coverage the farm decides to buy. Taxpayers also pay insurance companies to underwrite policies and bear a portion of the claims. And most policies actually insure against loss of revenue if price or production falls, not just against weather-related losses.

Now compare the lax farm income limits to the stringent process for SNAP benefits.  They disqualify any individual earning more than $14,160 a year and a family of four earning more than $29, 064.

In 2010, the average payment to the top 10 percent of subsidized farms was $38,411. The maximum SNAP yearly benefit is $2,400 for an individual and $8,016 for a family of four.

We at Environmental Working Group aren’t suggesting that the Terry family has done anything wrong, because their payments are all legal and above board. Which isn’t surprising considering that, as reported by the Politico, the man who represents the Terry family in Congress, Rep. Randy Neugebauer (R-Texas) has “implored his leadership to leave agricultural subsidies alone and cut food stamps.”

But the farmers of Roby, Texas, can’t be the only lucky ones out there.

Originally published on Environmental Working Group

When I first lost my job, we applied for emergency food assistance. Then, when I saw how little was provided for our family of five, I went into panic mode and bought the cheapest stuff I could find: a coffin-sized crate of ramen noodle packages, a box of Cheerios as big as an ottoman. No longer did I shop for the “best”—organic, free range, all natural—I was now shopping for the cheapest.

And I was not alone in trying to negotiate this shift from affluent foodie to poverty-level mom just trying to feed her family on next to nothing. Take a look at the numbers and be startled along with me. As you can see, there was an unprecedented jump in participants in the program after the Great Recession in 2008 began. Suddenly, families who were unaccustomed to financial struggle joined the ranks of the truly needy, and we didn’t know how to shop for it! And still, after a few years of this “New Poor” culture, we are looked at with derision when we try to maintain our values as careful consumers and healthy eaters.

Thankfully, however, there are ways to make a mountain (of produce) out of a molehill (of money.)

First of all: in a genius and enlightened move, SNAP allows for the purchase of food-bearing seeds to plant in your garden, if you’re lucky enough to have room for growing (we made space for raised beds by using our defunct driveway, an irony not lost on us.) I love the optimism the government has in my ability to nurture squash seeds to fruition! If you do your homework and learn everything you can about your own climate requirements, you can successfully supplement your family’s needs. We have also had luck with an informal bartering system with our neighbors, trading our little micro-harvests to add to the variety.

Also, keep an eye out for fruit trees in your community, and work up the courage to approach neighbors. We’ve managed to incorporate loquats, Asian pears, and blackberries to supplement our own abundantly-productive fruit trees—and we get to return the generosity. Or if you want to be more official about it, register at neighborhoodfruit.com. Even if you don’t have trees of your own, you can certainly enjoy the excess of someone who may not know what to do with all those plums that ripen at once.

Until recently, we had temporarily shelved our healthy, happy habit of shopping at farmers’ markets. Though it is heartening to see the foot-hold they’re gaining in the mind of the mainstream grocery shopper (see the good news for yourself here,) farmers’ markets were something we couldn’t enjoy as a family, as they were one of the few food outlets that didn’t take SNAP EBT cards. (And still today, only one-one hundredth of a percent of food stamp dollars are spent at farmers’ markets.) In a cheering development, that seems to be changing. Locally, our biggest farmers’ market-cum-swap meet has begun taking SNAP EBT as a form of payment for fresh produce. We are able to buy organic strawberries for half of what we’ve paid in our grocery store, and I can get a chance to interact with our local agricultural producers as well.

The Women, Infants and Children program (WIC) can be another option for adding to your family’s food coffers. They offer vouchers to exchange for simple, healthy foods such as brown rice, fruit, and vegetables, though it’s important to note that the program is limited to pregnant women, nursing mothers, and preschool-age children.

Sometimes I think we are the only family at the grocery store that buys collard greens and kale. We go through the line and, inevitably, the checker has to look up the code on her laminated cheat sheet. I expect it now, and maybe I could do these long-suffering cashiers the favor of memorizing the PLUs myself. Then I top it off by paying with my EBT card. Often this makes the cashier stop making eye contact.

It’s surprising how many people will criticize your desire to buy healthy, unprocessed foods on government assistance, while they think nothing of subsidizing the nation’s dependence on medications for type-two diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and other illnesses with a lifestyle component.

Further, the intentions of SNAP have changed since the inception of the program. “Healthy Food Access and Affordability: We Can Pay the Farmer or We Can Pay the Hospital” by Gus Schumacher, Michel Nischan, and Daniel Bowman Simon sheds light on the history and inter-relatedness of the WIC and food stamp (now SNAP) programs. Originally the program sought to provide the nation’s poor to access to surplus agricultural product. This benefited the farmers, and yes, through this symbiotic system, ensured that the program’s dollars would be spent on the types of food that would add to the health of our populace as a whole. Issues of autonomy and choice gained a stronghold. Government decided that the way to influence healthy eating among the nation’s food stamp recipients was best served through allowing recipients to purchase whatever they want, and relying on educational interventions to guide them to better choices, which has yielded minimal success.

Thankfully, it seems that advocates are acknowledging the failings of the past, and have begun to embrace incentives that direct federal dollars toward local agricultural products, such as providing private funds to double the worth of food stamp vouchers when spent at farmers’ markets.

In our home—in spite of our education and our commitment to organic and healthy eating—we still struggle with trying to avoid the cheap-and-easy route, especially when you can get white bread and Doritos for pennies. Sometimes, during especially stressful months—usually when it’s cold and rainy, the fruit trees are bare, and the paycheck comes in as thin and pitiful as ever—it’s tempting to just fill our family with what will satisfy their bellies. Happily, though, that happens less and less as our options for healthful fresh local foods expand. It feels good to feed your children a rainbow of colorful produce every day, and it’s satisfying that with careful purchasing, gardening, bartering, and taking advantage of enlightened new food stamp policies, we don’t have to let go of that.

There’s a new study out purporting to show that, as this AP story puts it, “healthy eating is a privilege of the rich.” In many ways, this headline is meant to be a spear slicing deeply into the Achilles heel of the food movement. In one stroke, it seems to confirm the stereotype of the elitist, Alice Waters-loving, farmers-market-shopping locavore who demands we all drop the Doritos and start learning to love kale chips instead. It is, however, a bit of an overstatement.The study, published in the journal Health Affairs, is actually doing something a bit different from what the news coverage would lead you to believe. The researchers have excellent pedigrees: epidemiologists from the University of Washington’s School of Public Health, including Adam Drewnowski, who has a large body of work looking at the various challenges of healthy eating for low-income people, and ways to overcome those challenges.

The authors looked at four basic nutrients that the USDA recommends Americans get more of: potassium, calcium, vitamin D, and fiber. Then they looked at the buying habits of a group of residents from King County, Wash. (an area that includes Seattle) and calculated the increase in cost for them to do just that. The eye-opening finding that got most of the press coverage was that increasing consumption of potassium to meet USDA recommendations “would add $380 per year to the average consumer’s food costs.”

But even the study authors admit that there’s a wrinkle here worth noting: They didn’t search out the cheapest source of potassium (bananas, for the record) to come up with that figure. They performed statistical analysis to model a diet higher in those nutrients based on what the study participants were already buying. That’s very different from trying to shop on a budget!

Indeed, their point was not to demonstrate that healthy eating is the province of the rich. Their conclusion was simply that “adopting a nutrient-dense diet in line with both dietary recommendations and current U.S. eating habits may raise food costs for consumers.” In other words, it’s not enough for the government to set dietary guidelines. It needs to radically change its policies, including but not limited to possibly subsidizing healthy foods, if we are to achieve the goal of healthy eating.

Last year, writers Jane Black and Brent Cunningham demonstrated the possibility of healthy, even locavore-style, eating on a tight budget during time spent researching a book in Huntington, W.Va., site of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution television show. They spend $2.38 per person per meal (cooked at home) while eating “plenty of organic produce … local eggs, buffalo meat and un-homogenized milk in glass bottles.” That’s not to say it’s easy, of course. But it’s not impossible.

The new study’s main thrust is that Americans will have to change their eating patterns if they are to eat a healthy diet affordably. But didn’t we know that already? Forget potassium — it’s well known that Americans don’t come even close to the recommended number of servings of fruits and vegetables, and if they tried, there wouldn’t be enough fruit and veggies to go around! The real question, which the study does not address, is how to get from where we are to where we want to be.

To me, the most interesting finding of the paper was not the “cost” of potassium (which may be a convenient nutrient for this kind of analysis but is certainly not the one most consumers focus on when shopping). Rather, it was the researchers’ results that showed “each time consumers obtained 1 percent more of their daily calories from saturated fat and added sugar, their food costs significantly declined.” Over the course of a year, a consumer could reduce food costs by $125 for each 1 percent increase in calories from sugar and fat. In other words, all the financial incentives point strongly to upping calories from fat and sugar and slashing the nutritional quality of the American diet.

The sad fact is that we are not born knowing how to shop for healthy food. While the concept of “healthy eating” has a long pedigree, for most of history the vast majority of people ate what was available or, if possible, the foods their parents ate. To vastly oversimplify, this fact held true for most people in the developed world until the middle of the last century when the great “labor saving” wave swept over American households (much to the relief of millions of women). It was at that moment that traditional “foodways” finally gave way to a corporate version that emphasizes convenience, ease, and palatability (achieved through manipulating sweet, fat, and salt). Government should be the obvious counterweight to the corporate marketing machine, but for reasons of internal conflicts and regulatory capture, it’s not.

Navigating the grocery aisles has never been more complicated — and not just for low-income folks. I can attest to the fact that many of my well-educated, affluent peers don’t manage things so well either, if the number of parents who serve their children sports drinks but limit soda is any indication. With time and money at an absolute premium and when most food education takes place in front of the television, do we really need a study like this to tell us which way the food winds are blowing?

Originally published on Grist

Food corporations enjoy carte blanche on what they can say about their foods, how and to whom they advertise, and even (to a large degree) the ingredients they choose to put in their foods. But when the Obama administration recently proposed voluntary guidelines [PDF] for the types of food advertised to children, industry giants decided to preempt these guidelines and create their own.

Since the government released its new guidelines, two powerful industry groups have reared up. One is the Sensible Food Policy Coalition, headed by former Obama press secretary Anita Dunn, and led by PepsiCo, Viacom, Kellogg’s, General Mills, Time Warner, the American Association of Advertising Agencies, and the Association of National Advertisers. This group was quickly created in response to the government’s new guidelines and its sole purpose is to prevent them from going into effect.

The second industry group making noise is the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), led by ConAgra, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, General Mills, and Kellogg’s. The members of CFBAI sell thousands of food and beverage products around the world and thus share joint interests when it comes to advertising policies.

The government’s guidelines evolved as part of Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign and are intended to protect children from the onslaught of advertising for highly processed, nutritionally void foods. The guidelines propose that by 2016, all food products most heavily marketed to children and adolescents ages two to 17 must meet the following two nutrition principles, “provide a meaningful contribution to a healthful diet,” and “should minimize the content of nutrients that could have a negative impact on health or weight.”

This translates as quite modest caps on added fat, sugar, and sodium: One gram or less of saturated fat, zero grams trans-fat, no more than 13 grams of added sugars, and no more than 210 grams of sodium per serving. The trouble is, many processed foods already meet this criteria: Trix cereal, which is heavily marketed to children across various social media platforms as well on TV and in print, contains 10 grams of sugar per serving, zero grams saturated fat and trans fat, and 180 mg of sodium, which puts it right up there with some of the worst foods our nation’s children are eating. Trix is chock full of sugar, additives, food dyes, and preservatives that have been to shown to have a myriad of ill effects.

The food industry members of the CFBAI called the voluntary guidelines, “unworkable and unrealistic” and then proposed their own guidelines—guidelines that would require no modifications to two-thirds of their food products. Meanwhile, the CFBAI is trying to paint this as groundbreaking progress and even the chairman of Federal Trade Commission (FTC) agrees. “The industry’s uniform standards are a significant advance and exactly the type of initiative the commission had in mind when we started pushing for self-regulation more than five years ago,” Jon Leibowitz, chairman of the FTC said in a statement about the advertising initiative.

It’s unclear how creating regulations that allow for two-thirds of the processed food products to remain unchanged is “significant progress.” What is clear is that the industrial food giants want no part in creating healthier foods for children. They claim the modest guidelines will cause job loss in an already troubled economy, appealing to the conservative base that scoffs at any government regulation, and crying “nanny-state,” when the government attempts to intervene in our health crisis.

And while the right wing makes claims of socialism and ridicules Michelle Obama for trying to regulate food corporations on grounds that the few should not control the many—the truth is, the few are indeed controlling the many. Large food conglomerates like General Mills, Kellogg’s, Con-Agra, PepsiCo, and Coca-Cola are the epitome of this scenario. These corporations effectively control what most middle-income and low-income people eat in this country. If you are born into a poor family, with relative food insecurity, then it makes economic sense to eat the most calorically rich (usually nutrient-void) foods for the least amount of money. Not coincidentally, this is what the large food corporations excel at producing.

It comes as no surprise then, that the most recent research examining obesity found that poor, African American women make up the largest population of obese Americans, with Latino women following close behind. In fact, poor women of all races were the most likely to be obese and the research shows troubling links between poverty, government assistance and health problems in the United States.

Findings from a Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity study released last November indicate a similar trend. The study found that the industry specifically targets teens and minority youth more often and with less healthy items. African American youth saw at least 50 percent more fast food ads on TV in 2009 than their white peers.

Kelly Brownell, director of the Rudd Center said this is particularly alarming since these are the populations most at-risk for obesity and diabetes. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the rate of obesity for African Americans is 51 percent higher than for white Americans, and the prevalence of obesity amongst the nation’s Hispanic American population is 21 percent higher than their white peers.

The Obama administration is on the right track by creating guidelines to regulate a food system that functions completely unchecked but it shouldn’t cower to industry pressure by allowing food corporations to regulate themselves—isn’t that exactly what they’ve been doing for the past 60 years?

Photo: via rocker_time3 on Flickr

In my recent critique of the new USDA dietary guidelines, I wrote that we’ll never see a real food version of MyPlate as long as the food industry holds sway over the guidelines and USDA continues to promote industrial foods.

While this is true, there’s no reason we can’t create our own “Real Food” version of MyPlate to promote what we think is healthy and what’s not. Admittedly, it’s difficult to convey a lot of information in a single graphic, but, in my opinion as a certified nutrition educator, MyPlate promotes foods that are unhealthy. There are structural problems with MyPlate as well—dairy should be included in the protein category and the glass next to the plate should be water.

Allowing industrial food corporations to influence the dietary guidelines—from dairy and meat to apple juice and corn flakes—makes it clear that the health of the American people is not the USDA’s top priority.

My “Real Food” approach to MyPlate clearly conveys what I think should be included and what should not be, and has no agenda other than presenting the healthiest real food diet for all Americans. The underpinnings of a real food diet is focused on plant-based, whole foods that are organic and sourced local, when possible.

Bottom Line: Simply giving these guidelines isn’t going to change the fact that too many Americans lack access to real foods. Change doesn’t appear to be happening from the top down anytime soon. In the meantime, by providing clear and accurate guidelines based on “Real Food,” I hope Americans can see what a “healthy” diet really looks like and start demanding access to these foods.

The following is an infographic of my “Real Food” Guide to MyPlate by Voltier Creative:

The European Union (EU) made a substantial step toward establishing a binding food labeling policy for its member states. According to an agreement reached by negotiators yesterday, all food products in the EU will be required within five years to display their energy, salt, sugar, protein, carbohydrate, fat, and saturated fat content. Once finalized, the food label policy would conclude a debate over the redesign of the European food label that started in 2008.

In the U.S., a comparable debate is about to take place. The Department of Agriculture recently released the “MyPlate” image as a replacement of the decades old food pyramid and the Food and Drug Administration is currently considering a redesign of the Nutritional Facts label, which lists values for calories, fats, sugars and other nutrients. While Americans negotiate which label might most effectively communicate nutritional values to consumers, it is worth looking to the experience of the EU.

Initially, lawmakers in Europe wanted to require a mandatory front-of-package labels and discussed requiring food companies to list Guideline Daily Amounts (GDA) of calories, sugars, fat, saturates, and salt in a serving of food. The deal reached Wednesday does not require that labels be on the front of packages or that they include the GDA figures.

One nutrition label design that proved particularly popular among European consumers (and controversial among industry groups and law makers) was the “traffic light label” that uses the colors red, yellow, and green to indicate whether a food product contains high, medium or a low amounts of fats, saturated fats, sugar, and salt.

“It is absolutely essential that it is simple, that you don’t need to sit down and start trying to work out what that percentage means,“ Dr. Vivienne Nathanson, head of science and ethics at the British Medical Association, told the BBC in 2010. “And the traffic lights system is something you can even see from a distance, so you can start to hone in on the foods that are predominantly green or green and amber and just cut down on the foods that are marked red.“

The traffic light label is already used on a voluntarily basis by a number of British food chains and manufacturers. It is supposed to help consumers compare products and make choices quickly when buying food.

In the European relabeling debate last year, the traffic light label received widespread support from the public and consumer protection groups. In one poll, 69 percent of the Germans favored the traffic light label. Also, separate studies of an Australian group of researchers and the UK consumer’s association found that the traffic light system was the most effective in assisting consumers to identify healthier foods.

Despite its popular support, EU lawmakers chose not to go with the traffic light label, deciding instead on the optional inclusion of a label that looks similar to the one recently proposed by the U.S. by the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Food Marketing Institute.

In Europe, the food industry groups criticized the traffic light label, saying it patronized consumers and that consumers who strictly adhered to the green lights would not be able to eat a healthy diet.  The non-profit research and campaign group Corporate Europe Observatory estimated that the Confederation of the Food and Drink Industries and its companies spent $1.45 trillion in order to assure the traffic light label was not chosen by lawmakers.

In June 2010, the politicians of the European parliament decided against mandating the traffic light label. The European Parliament’s chief negotiator on food labeling, Renate Sommer , said that the traffic light labeling was rejected because it over simplifies food choices.

“Coke Light is made with sweeteners instead of sugar, it would get a green light for sugar because it contains none, while natural fruit juice with no added sugar would get a red light because of its natural sugar content,” said Sommer. Also, one would create an incentive for the producers to substitute sugar with starch or sweeteners and salt with sodium glutamines in order to get more green lights.

In the U.S., there is a nation-wide design initiative to redesign the nutrition label that’s independent of the government and the food industry. Rethink the Food Label, a design challenge hosted by UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism’s News21 and Good magazine online is asking the public, graphic designers, and nutritionists to picture a revamped nutrition facts label.

Contributors are asked to incorporate the nutrition label’s existing break down of fats, sugar, vitamins, calorie count, and percent daily values; or completely re-imagine the label to include geography, food quality, food justice, added sugars or carbon footprint. The top designs will be judged by a panel of food thinkers and graphic designers that includes Michael Pollan, Robert Lustig, Andrew Vande Moere, and Laura Brunow Miner.

Top image via FSA; bottom image via GMA.

The USDA finally did away with the much-maligned Food Pyramid and replaced it with MyPlate. Many in the food world are calling it progress. It’s certainly a clearer and more concise image and deserves some credit for the fact that half of the plate is comprised of fruit and vegetables.

“This is a step in the right direction,” Marion Nestle wrote in an email. “It’s the best they could come up with and some education needs to go with it, as always.”

In my view though, when you look a little deeper, you see that beyond the clearer image not much has really changed.

The five food categories indicated in the image are: Fruits, Vegetables, Protein, Grains, and Dairy. At first glance the MyPlate image appears to eliminate many problematic sugary, processed foods, but when you actually click on the categories a host of unhealthy foods are revealed.

For example, the fruit category includes fruit juice which should be considered a “sugary drink” something the recommendations say to drink less of. There are 15 grams of sugar in one small four-ounce juice box of Mott’s 100 percent apple juice and an eight-ounce glass of Tropicana Orange juice has 22 grams of sugar—depending on how many ounces consumed, these fruit juices approach or even exceed the amount of sugar found in sodas.

There’s no doubt that fruit juice is a step up from soda but in a country where 26 million people have diabetes and many other people exhibit signs of insulin resistance (the precursor to diabetes) liquid sugar in any form is detrimental. This is why the fruit category should be strictly whole fruit—whole fruit contains fiber to help balance out the sugar content and thus has a lower glycemic load. Whole, fresh fruits also contain many vital vitamins, nutrients, and minerals not found in the processed juice version.

But many Americans don’t have enough access to fresh fruit—and the emphasis on drinking fruit juice appeals to food corporations who profit on fruit juices and other processed fruit products. Indeed, on the Web sites for Mott’s and Tropicana, you find out that your apple and orange juice provide the required fruit recommendations by the USDA.

When you click on the dairy category you find that chocolate and strawberry flavored milks are included—more examples of “sugary drinks” inexplicably deemed acceptable by the USDA.  Flavored milks, regularly served in school lunch cafeterias across the country and subject to much debate, contain loads of sugar. A serving of strawberry milk contains 27 grams of sugar, equal to the amount of sugar in eight ounces of Coca-Cola.

Meanwhile, the grains group remains amorphous. The guidelines do say to keep half of the grains you consume whole, but that’s not indicated in the graphic. Again, this group is far too inclusive and leads the consumer to believe that many highly refined ready-to-eat breakfast cereals, white buns, breads, and rolls are part of a healthy diet. Given these vague guidelines one could eat Lucky Charms for breakfast, a Subway sandwich on a white bread roll for lunch, and a few slices of Domino’s pizza for dinner and consider these processed grain-filled options as part of the healthy MyPlate meal.

Much on the MyPlate Web site is based on outdated science. The low-fat and fat-free dairy recommendations are based on the premise that saturated fats are harmful (see my article on fats for more on this) and that Americans should cut down on these calories—but the truth is Americans are not getting heavier due to the fat in dairy products but rather due to the overconsumption of sugars and refined carbohydrates.

As is illustrated in this infographic, while obesity rates have soared since the 1970s the amount of calories consumed in the form of dairy, meat, and nuts has remained mostly stable. On the other hand, the amount of calories consumed in added sugars, added fats (the type of fats are not indicated in this graphic but I would bet they are in the form of highly processed vegetable oils and trans-fats) and grains has also soared. This suggests that the fats found in real foods like dairy are not the cause of our nation’s massive weight gain.

The underlying issue is quality of food not just quantity. But this won’t be addressed as long as industrial food corporations hold sway over the dietary guidelines. Discussing quality gets to the root problem of access to healthy, whole foods in this country. Quite simply, the USDA cannot insist that people eat only high quality foods while many don’t have access to them. Herein lies a conflict of interest for the USDA since it has the dual role of promoting the business of industrial food production and simultaneously advising Americans on healthy eating.

Indeed, the MyPlate recommendation to, “Enjoy your food but eat less” is hardly helpful when the goal of the industrial food industry is to encourage Americans to eat more. Industrial food corporations are great at filling bellies with highly caloric yet nutritionally void food—and sugar and refined carbohydrates are the main culprits. If the USDA truly wanted to endorse healthier eating, it would focus on promoting nutrient-dense foods. Switching to a nutrient-dense diet goes a long way in addressing portion control—it’s difficult to overeat a real food diet.

The ideal image would be more exclusive–that is to say, many foods now endorsed by the USDA as part of MyPlate would be eliminated. The fruit group would be strictly fruit, the vegetable group strictly vegetables. The protein group would include dairy (the fact that dairy is a separate category highlights the influence of the powerful dairy lobby) and would eliminate the many processed foods now listed as part of these groups: Flavored milks, processed cheeses, processed deli meats, and processed soy products. The grains group would eliminate refined and processed grains and reserve these to be used minimally in the form of treats. The same applies to all sugary foods and sugary drinks.

As Michele Simon rightly points out in her recent post, what’s really needed to affect change are policy changes. She writes, “It’s going to take way more than a measly $2 million educational campaign to get Americans to fill up half their plate with fruits and vegetables. It’s going to take a massive overhaul of our agricultural policies.”

And this is why we’ll never see a real food MyPlate. As long as our current agricultural policies and farm subsidies remain the same, the government can’t offer much else in the way of recommendations. What they’ve recommended is what’s available to most of the American population—processed and packaged foods subsidized by government policies.

MyPlate is simply a cleaner graphic image with mostly the same old information. I can think of a much better way to spend that $2 million dollar budget: Fund urban farming projects so more Americans can actually fill those plates with fruits and vegetables. Now that would be real progress.