AP reports that a federal administrative judge ruled last week that POM Wonderful used deceptive advertising when claiming that its pomegranate juice could treat or prevent heart disease, prostate cancer and other illnesses. Chief Administrative Law Judge Michael Chappell sided with federal regulators and ordered POM to halt all claims of health benefits and performance for its beverage. Expert witnesses testified in court that scientific evidence does not support claims made in company advertising, which appeared in national newspapers, magazines and online.
ALEC Takes on AGs
Pop Tort, a blog of the Center for Justice and Democracy at New York Law School, describes a new tactic of the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) to defund state attorneys general who have been acting to protect consumers against fraudulent or dangerous corporate practices. Funded by many of America’s largest corporations, ALEC has been lobbying for bills in Mississippi, Montana and elsewhere that seek to strip AGs of the resources needed to fulfill this function.
Will World Health Assembly Mandate to Count NCDs Lead to Prevention?
Last week, the World Health Assembly, the governing body of the World Health Organization, voted in Geneva to adopt a new global target of a 25% reduction in premature mortality from noncommunicable diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and chronic respiratory diseases by 2025. All governments will now be obliged to collect data on diabetes and NCD deaths, and report regularly on progress to the United Nations. According to WHO officials, this mandatory target has the potential to drive significant action on heart disease, diabetes, cancer and chronic lung disease across all countries.
Timothy Armstrong, coordinator of Surveillance and Population-based Prevention in the Department of Chronic Diseases and Health Promotion at the WHO, said, “This is a landmark decision on the prevention and control of NCDs. For the first time, we are moving away from aspirational goals to an action-based approach that will be anchored in quantifiable targets.”
Representatives of non-governmental organizations (NGOs) also celebrated this new resolution. Ann Keeling, Chair of the NCD Alliance and CEO of the International Diabetes Federation declared: “The adoption of this bold and ambitious target is a landmark event in the fight against NCDs. For the first time all governments will be accountable for progress on NCDs. The NCD Alliance and its members and partners around the world have worked tirelessly for nearly a year for this. On behalf of the hundreds of millions of people with NCDs, we are delighted to see this result.”
While the vote is a step forward – at the UN High Level Meeting on NCDs in New York City last September, governments concerned about austerity and fiscal constraints and representatives of the food, tobacco, alcohol and pharmaceutical industries worried about threats to profits from a determined global campaign to prevent NCDs joined forces to delay any specific targets for reductions in NCD deaths.
Several daunting challenges face effective action to prevent premature deaths and avoidable illnesses from NCDs. Currently, the provisions of trade agreements negotiated through the World Trade Organization or bilateral or multilateral agreements among nations often preclude the effective regulation of the tobacco, alcohol and food industries that have played a prominent role in creating the current burden of NCDs. Ron Labonte and his colleagues explain these relationships in a recent report on international trade and chronic disease.
In addition, these agreements protect the intellectual property rights of pharmaceutical companies, making it more difficult for emerging and low income nations to produce and distribute at affordable prices the medications that can help prevent complications from heart disease, cancer or diabetes. As a public health commentator in Australia asked about last week’s agreement, “Will World Trade Organization (WTO), World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) policies help or exacerbate the problem?” In the past, these organizations have often promoted corporate-managed trade at the expense of public health protection. Another obstacle to effective action is the determined efforts by multinational corporations to avoid public health oversight. In the United States and the United Kingdom, two countries with a long history of public regulation, the food and beverage industries have recently launched mostly successful campaigns to thwart stronger regulation of the products most associated with diet-related chronic conditions. If the governments of two of the wealthiest nations are unable to stand up to special interests, what are the chances for many poorer nations?
In addition, new worries about economic growth in India and China, two countries with the largest number of people predicted to come down with NCDs in coming decades, may limit resources for public health prevention and further tilt these governments to adopt pro-market policies that contribute to NCDs. As I noted in an earlier post, Coke, Pepsi and fast food companies have targeted China as their next growth area, ensuring a new generation of people with diet-related chronic diseases.
Some have also questioned whether the UN has the backbone or muscle to stand up to special interest. WHO is itself going through a complex re-organization, distracting top officials at least to some extent. Some critics have also warned about the growing dependence of WHO on corporate and philanthropic funding, trends which might compromise its ability to speak clearly for health.
The resolution on NCDs passed by the UN General Assembly in September 2012 requires countries to develop and report back to the UN their national NCD plans in 2014. What can public health professionals do to ensure progress by that date?
One concrete starting place is the Rio plus 20 United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development to be held in Rio de Janiero on June 20-22. At this meeting and in its aftermath, activists and governments can strengthen the ties between organizations and constituencies concerned about sustainable development and those concerned about NCDs. Solutions to each require charting a new path that ends the promotion of patterns of consumption that threaten the planet’s future and create new epidemics of NCDs. Charting policies that discourage the corporate promotion of unhealthy and unsustainable lifestyles and strengthening the capacity of governments and international organizations to act to protect public health and the environment are the broader goals of such an alliance. Such an agenda can begin to catalyze the movements that will have the passion and power to suggest that another road to human development is possible.
Different nations have the potential to play different roles in creating a new ethic of healthy and sustainable consumption. The wealthiest nations in North America and Europe can find new ways to re-create past successes in public health protection and apply them to the twenty first century challenges of growing inequality, persistent poverty and unsustainable consumption. Emerging nations like China, India, Brazil and South Africa can experiment with new approaches to bringing the benefits of prosperity to large sectors of their populations without imposing on them the burden of premature mortality, preventable illness and unaffordable health care costs now observed in many Western nations. Finally, the poorest nations have the most to gain by continuing progress in reducing infectious diseases without going down the road that will bring them to high levels of NCDs. All nations will encounter the determined resistance from the multinational corporations that continue to profit from current patterns of NCDs. Finding new ways to confront that force will determine whether counting NCDs, as now required by the World Health Assembly, can be a first step towards preventing them.
Image Credits:
2. Dave Proffer via Flickr
More on Slowing Down Fast Food: A Guide to Fighting Fast Food in Your Own Back Yard
Cross posted from Appetite for Profit.
It’s hard not to get depressed over the politics of food these days, given the massive power of the food industry to influence everything from the farm bill to childhood obesity.
So a new report, Slowing Down Fast Food: A policy guide for healthier kids and families, on how we can fight back couldn’t come at a better time. A joint project of Corporate Accountability International and Dr. Nicholas Freudenberg and Monica Gagnon of The City University of New York, the guide focuses on four local policy approaches: school policy, “healthy” zoning, curbing kid-focused marketing, and redirecting subsidies to healthier businesses. (Full disclosure: I am a consultant for Corporate Accountability.)
While it’s true that things in Washington are pretty hopeless, many viable policy options exists at the local level and this report offers case studies and tips for success, plus a whole lot of inspiration.
For example, St. Paul Public Schools (Minnesota’s second largest school district with 64 schools) formed a wellness committee and got a strong policy passed that (among other provisions) prohibits marketing of brands promoting low-nutrition foods and beverages. Advocates brought in researchers from the nearby university, who helped make the connection between food and academic achievement. The policy has been so successful that a nearby hospital has expressed interest in following the school district’s lead. That’s how good local policy ideas can spread.
The guide’s section on zoning restrictions provides several examples of local policies that have been enacted across the country. For example, restrictions on chain restaurants (either outright bans or limits on the number permissible) exist in several California cities, as well as cities in Massachusetts and Maine. An ordinance dating back to 1978 in Detroit prohibits fast food outlets within 500 feet of schools, thus reducing children’s exposure to harmful marketing messages.
In my own neighborhood in Oakland, California in 2004, I was part of a successful effort to keep McDonald’s from moving in directly across the street from my beloved Grand Lake farmers market. It just took a few dedicated leaders to organize to stop the fast food monster, along with supportive policymakers. I spoke to an overflow crowd at the local church and was never more proud of my community. (I also worried about what other neighborhood that franchisee probably went to instead.)
In another inspiring success story, in 2008, the city of Los Angeles placed a one-year moratorium on new fast food outlets in south and east L.A, two particularly poor areas with a high density of fast food. Steps that helped get the job done included surveys and other data gathering, finding a champion in the city council, speaking out at council meetings, and of course, a ton of organizing and coalition building. This was the first time a government placed a moratorium on fast food for health reasons. Last year, the city council extended the moratorium indefinitely.
Another success story I wrote about in 2010, when San Francisco enacted a law to place nutrition standards on kids’ meals that include a toy incentive. Of course, the fast food industry, especially McDonald’s, fought the effort vociferously. But a broad coalition of Bay Area groups, working in coordination with Corporate Accountability International, was able to overcome the lobbying onslaught through true grassroots mobilization.
The specific tactics that the fast food industry deployed in this fight are instructive and included:
1) Stakeholder status. McDonald’s attempted to insert itself into the policy-making process, proposing changes to the bill that would have gutted it;
2) Scare tactics. Once they realized that wouldn’t work, McDonald’s and friends shifted to threatening the city with legal action, regardless of how baseless their claims were;
3) Distractions with PR. McDonald’s hired a PR firm, which (among other tactics) tried to convince ordinance author Supervisor Eric Mar that voluntary standards would work.
Despite the hard-won victory, as I wrote about last December, McDonald’s cynically found a way around complying with the law. However, much was gained in the process, including bringing greater awareness to the issue. Also, soon after the bill’s passage, Jack in the Box pulled toys from its kids’ meals.
Another promising local approach is ending public subsidies such as tax incentives and zoning breaks. Some cities offer small business subsidies to fast food franchises, which seems rather ironic for multinational corporations like Subway and KFC. As Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer has noted, “There is no defensible policy rationale for subsidizing fast food restaurants.”
The guide also lists numerous other ideas, including restrictions on marketing to children, menu labeling, taxation, and counter-marketing strategies. The authors conclude while no one community can do every action, “everyone can do something that will help to create food environments that will guarantee the health of our children and our communities.”
Also included is a handy Action Guide, with specific steps for how to get your community engaged such as, assessing the political landscape, framing and messaging, and most importantly, building community support.
There has never been a better time to get active and take a stand against the infiltration of fast food in your neighborhood. We certainly cannot wait for policymakers in Washington to protect the people. Download Slowing Down Fast Food and start mobilizing your community. I guarantee it will be a challenging yet rewarding experience.
Then be sure to tell me how it goes, so I can write about your success story next.
Irish Alcohol Industry Opposes Proposed Ban on Sports Sponsorships
“If I sponsor an event with a particular product, am I looking for somebody to buy more of it or young people to buy more of it? I’m actually looking for you to buy my product over my competitor’s product – it’s actually about brand differentiation.” So explained Kathryn D’Arcy of the Alcohol Beverage Association of Ireland. In the Irish Examiner, she admitted that alcohol misuse is a serious problem in Ireland and needs to be tackled, but argued the proposed ban on alcohol industry sponsorship of sports events would not achieve that goal.
Tobacco Industry Promoted Unproven Flame Retardants in Furniture to Avoid Creating “Fire-safe” Cigarettes
In a series of investigative reports on endocrine disruptors in flame retardants, Patricia Callahan and Sam Roe reported in theChicago Tribune that in the late 1980s, the tobacco industry convinced the National Association of State Fire Marshals to back the use of unproven flame retardants in furniture to reduce fire deaths. Why did the tobacco industry care? Because they wanted to avoid pressure to design “fire-safe” cigarettes, a difficult engineering task that might have cut into their profits.
More Empty Recommendations on Junk Food Marketing to Children
Cross posted from Center for Food Safety.
Institute of Medicine Gives Big Food Another Deadline – or else!
This week, the nation’s top public health experts gathered at a much-trumpeted obesity conference hosted by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called Weight of the Nation. (A quick glance at the agenda reveals nothing that would even begin to challenge the food industry.)
Released at this bland event was an equally uninspired report from the Institute of Medicine (IOM, an advisory arm of Congress) called, Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention: Solving the Weight of the Nation.
The irony of the report’s title gets lost among the 478 pages that aim to solve “this complex, stubborn problem” with “a comprehensive set of solutions.”
One of the recommendations intended to speed things up is for the food industry to “take broad, common, and urgent voluntary action to make substantial improvements” to marketing aimed at kids. This is certainly important, as advocates have for years been sounding the alarm about the intractable problem of junk food marketing to children and its connection to poor health. But another part of the IOM dictate sounded vaguely familiar:
If such marketing standards have not been adopted within two years by a substantial majority of food, beverage, restaurant, and media companies that market foods and beverages to children and adolescents, policy makers at the local, state, and federal levels should consider setting mandatory nutritional standards for marketing to this age group to ensure that such standards are implemented.
Two years? Where have I heard that deadline before? Oh yes, it was another IOM report, this one focused entirely on food marketing to children, from 2005, which reviewed the science showing a clear connection between junk food marketing and children’s dietary habits. That report said if voluntary efforts by industry to clean up its act were unsuccessful, “Congress should enact legislation mandating” a shift in advertising. Also, that “[w]ithin 2 years the Secretary [of health] should report to Congress on the progress and on additional actions necessary to accelerate progress.”
So it’s been 5 years since that earlier deadline has passed and now the food industry has 2 more years to show how much it really cares about kids? Did anyone at IOM bother to check its earlier reports before writing this one? But it’s hardly IOM’s fault. If anyone is to blame for lack of action on this issue, it’s Congress and the White House, as two recent reports make painfully clear.
An in-depth investigation by Reuters describes the dirty details of the onslaught of Big Food lobbying in the wake of an effort by the federal government to improve voluntary guidelines on food marketing to kids. Reuters found that food and beverage lobbyists spent more than $175 million lobbying since President Obama took office in 2009, more than double that spent in the previous three years, during the Bush Administration. “In contrast, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, widely regarded as the lead lobbying force for healthier food, spent about $70,000 lobbying last year — roughly what those opposing the stricter guidelines spent every 13 hours.”
Reuters also examined lobbying visits to the White House, finding that a “who’s who of food company chief executives and lobbyists visited the White House” including:
CEOs of Nestle USA, Kellogg, General Mills, and top executives at Walt Disney, Time Warner, and Viacom, owner of the Nickelodeon children’s channel — companies with some of the biggest financial stakes in marketing to children. Those companies have a combined market value of more than $350 billion.
Another damning report emerged this month from the Sunlight Foundation found similar influence from Big Food. The strategy was for industry lobbyists to give money to members of Congress in exchange for their sending letters objecting to federal agency efforts. Here is how Sunlight describes one such transaction:
Days after receiving several campaign checks from the food lobby last May, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat who is up for re-election this year, sent a letter raising concerns about the Federal Trade Commission’s efforts to develop voluntary guidelines aimed at toning down the marketing of junk food to kids.
Seems Klobuchar wasn’t the only Democrat on the dole. Sunlight found that while most letter-writers were Republicans, lobbyist campaign donations held particular sway with Senate Democrats. Those who wrote letters of objection “collected on average, more than twice as much campaign money from food lobbying interests since 2008 as those who did not write letters.” A similar pattern also held in the House, where 38 Democrats wrote letters of protest.
As Jeff McIntyre, policy director for the advocacy group Children Now told Reuters: “We just got beat. Money wins.” That’s why it’s irrelevant how many more recommendations or deadlines come from the Institute of Medicine or any other panel of experts on how to “accelerate” progress. The only thing getting accelerated is lobbying dollars into politicians’ pockets. And kids’ poor health.
Originally posted at Center for Food Safety.
Image 2 Credit:
Chinese Melamine and American Vioxx: A Comparison
In an article in The American Conservative, Ron Unz compares the media response to the 2008 contamination of infant formula in China with the response to the coverage of the 2004 coverage of Merck’s withdrawal of the pain killer Vioxx. He notes that “in comparing China and America, pundits often cite our free and independent media as one of our greatest strengths.” However, he concludes that “American journalists seemed to focus more attention on a half-dozen fatalities in China than they did on the premature deaths of as many as 500,000 of their fellow American citizens.”
Corporations Win in Battle Against Investment Regulation
In a world where governments are increasingly subservient to global finance capital, multinationals are gaining ground in the fight against state regulations that aim to protect the environment, public health or social policies. According to data reported by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, the total number of known treaty-based investor–State dispute settlement cases filed by the end of 2011 grew to 450, an increase of more than 900% since 2000. Bilateral investment treaties establish the conditions for investment by companies of one country in another state. By allowing investors but not states to go to court to reverse the decisions of national governments, these treaties provide multinational corporations with new tools to fight state regulations against investments considered to harm health.
Obesity Prevalence and Costs Rise; House of Representatives and Supreme Court Hamstring Fight Against Obesity
A new report to be published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine estimates a 33 percent increase in obesity prevalence and a 130 percent increase in severe obesity prevalence over the next two decades. By 2030, according to this forecast, 42 percent of Americans will be obese and 11 percent severely obese. The authors conclude that “if these forecasts prove accurate this will further hinder efforts for healthcare cost containment.” The authors also conclude that if obesity rates stayed at the 2010 levels, the combined savings in medical expenditures by 2030 would be $549.5 billion.
Another new report published in the Journal of Health Care Economics estimated that the total cost of health care associated with U.S. obesity is now $190.2 billion a year, or 20.6 percent of total U.S. health spending – twice as much as previously reported.
Last month, the US House of Representatives voted to eliminate the Prevention and Public Health Fund in order to pay for legislation dealing with student loans. Although the measure is not expected to pass the Senate and President Obama has vowed to veto it, by this vote the House proposed to eliminate one of the few streams of funding to support preventive measures to reduce obesity and other health problems that contribute to diabetes, heart disease and cancer.
Last week Public Citizen and the National Association of Consumer Advocates released a report called Justice Denied One Year Later. The report notes that in the one year since the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion, consumers have regularly been blocked from pursuing class-action cases. In its Concepcion decision, the court vastly expanded the reach of arbitration by ruling that corporations could block the consumers they force into arbitration from pursuing cases as a class.
According to the report:
Since Concepcion, judges have cited the case in decisions that stopped at least 76 potential class-action lawsuits from going forward. Several judges have expressed frustration that the decision has forced them to stop consumer actions that are best suited to proceed as class actions. Class-action lawsuits historically have provided a means to combat illegal payday lending practices, contest poor business practices and confront discriminatory auto lending. But Concepcion has left many consumers without a means to pursue redress.
In the case of tobacco, public health experts agree that class action lawsuits played a vital role in strengthening public health protection against a tobacco industry determined to make profits even at the expense of their customers’ health.
Whatever the intentions, by seeking to de-fund one of the few federal funding streams for prevention of obesity and other diet-related diseases and by denying consumers a powerful tool to change food industry practices that have been shown to contribute to obesity, the House of Representatives and the Supreme Court have voted to endorse the status quo of rising obesity rates.
Image Credits:
Corporations and Health Watch 
