Interview with Joel Bakan, Author of Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children

Posted on by Corporations and Health Watch

Joel Bakan is Professor of Law at the University of British Columbia in Canada, where he teaches and writes about constitutional law. He is author of the book The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power, (2004) and writer and co-creator of the documentary film, The Corporation. Last year, he published Childhood Under Siege: How Big Business Targets Children (Free Press, 2011). Recently, CHW’s Monica Gagnon interviewed Bakan. An edited version follows.

CHW: Your previous book, The Corporation, focused on the behavior of corporations more generally. What inspired you to look specifically at corporate targeting of children in Childhood Under Siege?

JB: In The Corporation, I saw that the way that corporations targeted children was a really important topic, but I was only able to look at it as part of this larger project. As I was out on the road with both the book and the film, this seemed to be an issue that people were really concerned about. I’m also a father of two teenagers who were then around six or seven, so I was starting to see some of the effects of the corporate world on their lives and on my life as a parent. So that all came together and got me back into the writing chair to write this book.

CHW: In your new book, you write about the “new curriculum of childhood.” What do you mean by this?

JB: I found the term the “new curriculum of childhood” in another source, and it really hit me at the time. I had just finished reading a study by the Kaiser Family Foundation, which showed that children spend, on average, 8-10 hours a day engaged with commercial media. That is twice the amount of time they spend in school, and so it really seemed a propos to call this the “new curriculum of childhood.” What kids are learning from commercial media is the dominant influence in terms of their intellectual formation and their value formation. Increasingly, family influence and the influence of teachers have really subsided in relation to the influence of corporate marketers, advertisers and companies that are producing products. To me that is a quite radical shift.

CHW: You write that parents can be powerless to protect children from this harmful corporate influence. Why is this case?

JB: I think parents are the first line of defense for children, but the issues have become much larger than what parents can handle. As a society we can create conditions that are either hostile or facilitative of parents being able to do their job of protecting kids’ interests, and currently we’re creating conditions that are disempowering parents. I did an interview with a children’s environmental health expert, Dr. Bruce Lanphear, about the effect of industrial chemicals on children’s developing biological systems. I said, “How do you deal with this as a father?” and he said, “I can’t.” Parents shouldn’t be expected to be chemists. They simply don’t have the knowledge or the ability, and this is something that government regulators can and should do but are not dealing with.

Look at marketing targeted to children. When I was young, all my mother and father had to worry about was a television set in the living room and three channels. Now kids are out in the world with mobile devices, interacting with media. So how do parents control their children’s use of media in this context? How do you do it when your kids’ very social life depends on their being on Facebook, which is a marketing platform?

I look at pharmaceuticals as well. I tell the story of the tragic suicide of a girl while she was on Zoloft. The doctors and her parents thought Zoloft was a good drug. It turned out the company that produces it, Pfizer, had actually done studies that showed that when kids or teens took that antidepressant, the risk of suicide increased substantially. How is a parent supposed to protect his or her child without access to information that the company has failed to disclose, but that has crucial relevance for making decisions about their child? The problem is too big and the information too inaccessible. Parents don’t have 24 hours a day to become researchers in all of these areas. What we need to do as a society is deal with these issues in a way that makes it possible for parents to make good decisions that protect their children.

CHW: What are some of the implications of these corporate actions for public health?

JB: One of the public health issues I describe in the book is marketing. The American Psychological Association has just come out with a report that summarizes a review of a year’s literature on the effects of sexualized media on girls, and finds that there are links to low self-esteem, eating disorders and inappropriate sexual behavior. All of these things as companies are targeting younger and younger girls with more and more sexualized material. That’s a public health issue.

It’s a public health issue that many kids are becoming compulsive game players and social network participants. Currently, gaming and social network addiction are not recognized as true addictions, but I think any parent can tell you that their kids’ use of this media sometimes reaches unhealthy levels of compulsion, taking them away from interactions with family, from their school work and from sports. In the book, I look very closely at how game designers specifically rely upon behaviorists and psychological research to try to create games that are addicting.

Another issue I deal with is children’s unique vulnerability to environmental toxins. You have research showing that even very small quantities of industrial chemicals can have profound effects on developing biological systems. Industry continues to lobby for the most minimal constraints on production, distribution and emission of these chemical toxins, to the point where right now there are 90,000 industrial chemicals in the environment, and only 200 of those have been sufficiently tested for health effects. We’ve been taking this approach that chemicals are effectively innocent until proven guilty, and as a result, we’re creating an environment that is likely very toxic for children. One of the people I interviewed, an expert on children’s environmental health, Dr. Leo Trasande, said, “We are the humans in a dangerous and unnatural experiment, and it’s unconscionable.”

CHW: How have corporations responded to your criticisms?

JB: People who work in corporations really wear two hats. Yes, they make decisions that lead to actions that cause harm, but at the same time they’re human beings. They’re parents too. They live in this world too, and they’re as concerned as any other audience. I think I have, with this book, hit a nerve, because if you’re a parent there’s really nothing you care about more than your kids’ health and wellbeing. But there is a powerful feeling of disempowerment among parents today. What I suggest in the book is we have to perform our responsibilities as parents and do the best we can to protect our kids from all of this, but we also have a responsibility as citizens to try to change the conditions in which we’re parenting, to try to create a better society from the perspective of our kids.

CHW: One of the five ways corporations harm kids that you detail in your book is through pharmaceuticals. This is also one of the issues we examine at CHW. Can you give an example of how the pharmaceutical industry harms children?

JB: Over the last 30 years, pharmaceutical companies have ramped up their efforts to get kids on psychotropic drugs. In 1980, it was almost unheard of for a child to be diagnosed with a mental disorder and prescribed drugs to treat it. Now it’s as common as giving out antibiotics for strep throat. What has happened over the last 30 years? Have kids become so much more mentally ill? Is it a result of us becoming better at diagnosing mental illness? Or is there a third factor — pharmaceutical companies’ relentless marketing campaigns to doctors, to parents and children to sell the idea that certain behavioral difficulties are, in fact, psychiatric disorders that require treatment with drugs. The pharmaceutical industry has also managed, through various legal changes that took place in the early 1980s, to effectively take over medical research. The process of conducting clinical trials and publishing studies is much more driven now by corporate money than it ever was. This creates a systemic bias in favor of drug treatments that, I argue in the book, is likely leading to more kids being put on more psychotropic drugs for more disorders than is scientifically justified.

CHW: In your opinion, why is there not more governmental regulation of these issues?

JB: We’re currently going through a period where the notion of governments playing an active role in protecting public interest and promoting public good has been thoroughly undermined, and where the notion that markets and corporations should be free of any government restrictions seems to be in play. What I’m saying in this book is that as governments have pulled out of the task of trying to protect children, whether from chemical toxins or from mental toxins in the marketing context, or from undue prescriptions of psychotropic drugs, we’ve seen mounting harms to children.

CHW: Is government regulation the best solution? Are there other solutions?

JB: Government is definitely not sufficient. You can’t run childhood simply through government regulation. But, while it’s not sufficient, I do believe it’s necessary, because I don’t believe parents have the ability to protect their children from many of the harms that I outline. We need governments to step in and actually stop industry from throwing certain kinds of harms at our kids. In a democracy, that’s how it’s supposed to work. Governments are supposed to represent the people and defend the people’s interests, and somehow we’ve gone all askew on that. The main people whose interests are being protected in our current order are corporate persons. The rest of us have been told that it’s no longer the job of government to protect us.

CHW: What have you found in your research that gives you hope that corporations’ effect on children can be reversed? What can health advocates do to help?

JB: In all the areas I look at, there are real champions at all levels of government, in various non-governmental organizations and in parents’ groups. The problem, at the moment, is really a political problem. It’s that somehow the political will isn’t strong enough to address these issues in the way that they need to be addressed. There are lots of reasons for that, not the least of which that the industries involved have both feet in the door of the political process. Democracy is messy, difficult, complicated, and the only way we’re going to turn these things around is if we as citizens become active and do what we can in relation to these issues.

Appropriating Medicine and Public Health for Marketing Ill Health

Posted on by Corporations and Health Watch

In the last century, corporations have found new ways to appropriate medical authority to improve marketing of products that harm the health of the public. In a special section of the January 2012 issue of the American Journal of Public Health, researchers describe some of the ways that the alcohol, tobacco and pharmaceutical industries have undermined medical and public health professionalism in order to advance their economic interests.

In the first article,[1] James Mosher, a long-time alcohol policy researcher, describes how the distilled spirits industry developed new products such as alcopops, sweetened soda-like beverages, to regain the youth market after losing market share to beer makers. The article focuses on Smirnoff Vodka brand, a product of Diageo, the world’s largest producer of distilled spirits. Through sophisticated marketing, public relations and lobbying campaigns, Diageo was able to overcome public health opposition to win tax and regulatory changes that allowed them to target their products at young people, especially young female drinkers. These victories enabled Diageo to regain market share among young drinkers and to secure brand loyalty from future generations of spirits drinkers. In achieving their business objective, Diageo undercut progress toward the national health goal of reducing youth drinking.

Smirnoff Ice, a citrus-flavored malt beverage

In a second article on the alcohol industry,[2] David Jernigan of the Johns Hopkins Center on Alcohol Marketing to Youth at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health – and a CHW Contributing Writer – describes the International Center for Alcohol Policies, created by the global alcohol industry to advance its business, political and scientific objectives. Jernigan documents how ICAP has sought to counter the World Health Organization and independent alcohol researchers by producing reports, sponsoring scientific meetings and commissioning industry-friendly researchers to contest scientific findings that threaten industry profits.

In another article Allan M. Brandt,[3] the Harvard historian who wrote The Cigarette Century: The Rise, fall and Deadly Persistence of Product that Defined America, also looks at industry efforts to challenge medical and scientific research that show a product’s harm. Brandt explains how the tobacco industry “invented the modern problem of conflict of interest” by seeking to “erode, condemn and confuse” the growing body of scientific evidence that “threatened to destroy its prized, highly popular and exclusive product.”

Finally, Joseph Ross and his colleagues[4] at the Yale University School of Medicine analyze how pharmaceutical industry practices “distort the medical literature and undermine clinical trial research, explicitly by obscuring information that is relevant to patients and physicians.” Among the practices they examine are seeding trials, publication planning, messaging, ghost writing and selective publication and reporting of trial outcomes.

In an editorial[5] accompanying the special section, David J. Rothman, a historian at Columbia University, suggests policy options for reducing harmful corporate influences on professional practice of medicine and public health. These include requiring food, tobacco and alcohol companies to disclose all gifts and funds given to physicians, as is now required for the pharmaceutical industry, and strengthening federal regulation of health claims made by the food and alcohol industries, paralleling the new authority given to the Food and Drug Administration to provide oversight of tobacco industry advertising claims. Rothman also urges academic medical centers to ensure that corporate research grants to its physicians are not “marketing ventures in disguise.”

These articles make an important contribution to the small but growing literature that compares the strategies that different industries use in order to develop more effective public health approaches to minimizing their harm. For example, several comparisons of the food and tobacco industries have analyzed their similarities and differences.[6, 7, 8, 9] More specifically, researchers have compared the use and misuse of health claims[10] and the value of regulation and self-regulation, [11, 12]analyzed how different industries have used the legal concept of preemption to weaken regulation;[13, 14]and examined the use of commercial speech protections by the food, pharmaceutical and tobacco industries.[15] Some studies look at the cumulative impact of several industries on single outcomes, e.g. the influence of the food, alcohol and tobacco industries on cancer[16] or on classes of outcomes, e.g., these same three industries influence on NCDs.[17] Finally, several analysts have compared the success and limitations of public health strategies to counter industry influences such as litigation,[18, 19] media advocacy,[20] counter advertising,[21, 22] and advocacy campaigns.[23]

The articles in the American Journal of Public Health special section and the others cited above show how corporations and their allies have sought either to use the authority and credibility of medicine and public health to advance their business interests, or, failing that, to undermine their legitimacy or sow confusion. Too often, scientists and their institutions have entered into Faustian bargains, trading their public trust for industry financial support for their research. Public health and biomedical researchers now have both an opportunity and a responsibility to undo this damage and restore public credibility by advancing a research and policy agenda that puts the public’s health first.

Possible goals for such an agenda include ongoing surveillance of business practices that endanger health in order to provide early warning signs for public health action; research on the effects of misleading or deceptive health claims and the effectiveness of various strategies to discourage such claims; and the development and enforcement of  university and medical center standards to prevent researchers from becoming unidentified marketing agents for specific products, companies or industries.

To date, few governments have the political will to advance such an agenda and non-governmental organizations lack the mandates, capacity or resources to take on these tasks. Perhaps mobilized public health and biomedical researchers can help to spark the changes needed to better protect the health of the 99% of the world’s population whose health now suffers because of the practices of the corporations owned by the 1%.

 

References

[1] Mosher JF. Joe Camel in a Bottle: Diageo, the Smirnoff Brand, and the Transformation of the Youth Alcohol Market. Am J Public Health. 2012;102(1):56-63.

[2]Jernigan DH. Global Alcohol Producers, Science, and Policy: The Case of the International Center for Alcohol Policies. Am J Public Health. 2012; 102(1):80-89.

[3] Brandt AM. Inventing Conflicts of Interest: A History of Tobacco Industry Tactics. Am J Public Health. 2012; 102(1): 63-71.

[4] Ross JS, Gross CP, Krumholz HM. Promoting Transparency in Pharmaceutical Industry-Sponsored Research. Am J Public Health. 2012; 102(1): 72-80.

[5] Rothman DJ. Consequences of Industry Relationships for Public Health and Medicine. Am J Public Health. 2012; 102(1):55.

[6] Brownell KD, Warner KE. The perils of ignoring history: Big Tobacco played dirty and millions died. How similar is Big Food? Milbank Q. 2009; 87(1):259-94.

[7] Alderman J, Daynard RA. Applying lessons from tobacco litigation to obesity lawsuits. Am J Prev Med. 2006 Jan;30(1):82-8. Erratum in: Am J Prev Med. 2006;30(4):363.

[8] Kersh R, Morone J. The politics of obesity: seven steps to government action. Health Aff (Millwood). 2002;21(6): 42-5.

[9] Courtney B. Is obesity really the next tobacco? Lessons learned from tobacco for obesity litigation. Ann Health Law. 2006 ;15(1):61-106.

[10] Ellwood KC, Trumbo PR, Kavanaugh CJ. How the US Food and Drug Administration evaluates the scientific evidence for health claims. Nutr Rev. 2010;68(2):114-21.

[11] Sugarman SD. Performance-based regulation: enterprise responsibility for reducing death, injury, and disease caused by consumer products. J Health Polit Policy Law. 2009 Dec; 34(6):1035-77.

[12] : Jernigan DH. Public health tools for holding self-regulators accountable: lessons from the alcohol experience. Health Promot Pract. 2011 May;12(3):336-40.

[13] Annas GJ. Good law from tragic facts—Congress, the FDA, and preemption. N Engl J Med. 2009; 361(12):1206-11.

[14] Gorovitz E, Mosher J, Pertschuk M. Preemption or prevention?: lessons from efforts to control firearms, alcohol, and tobacco. J Public Health Policy.1998;19(1):36-50.

[15] Orentlicher D. The commercial speech doctrine in health regulation: the clash between the public interest in a robust First Amendment and the public interest in effective protection from harm. Am J Law Med. 2011;37(2-3):299-314.

[16] Freudenberg N, Galea S, Fahs M. Changing corporate practices to reduce cancer disparities. J Health Care Poor Underserved. 2008 Feb; 19(1):26-40.

[17] Beaglehole R, Bonita R, Horton R, et al. Priority actions for the non-communicable. disease crisis. Lancet 2011; 377: 1438–47.

[18] Parmet WE, Daynard RA. The new public health litigation. Annu Rev Public Health. 2000;21:437-54.

[19] Lytton TD. Using litigation to make public health policy: theoretical and empirical challenges in assessing product liability, tobacco, and gun litigation. J Law Med Ethics. 2004; 32(4):556-64.

[20] Dorfman L, Wallack L, Woodruff K. More than a message: framing public health advocacy to change corporate practices. Health Educ Behav. 2005 Jun; 32(3):320-36.

[21] Agostinelli G, Grube JW. Alcohol counter-advertising and the media. A review of recent research. Alcohol Res Health. 2002; 26(1):15-21.

[22] Agostinelli G, Grube JW. Tobacco counter-advertising: a review of the literature and a conceptual model for understanding effects. J Health Commun 2003; 8(2): 07- 27.

[23] Freudenberg N, Bradley SP, Serrano M. Public health campaigns to change industry practices that damage health: an analysis of 12 case studies. Health Educ Behav. 2009;36(2):230-49.

 

Image Credits:

1. Corporations and Health Watch

2. Seidoger via flickr.

3. Gullig via flickr.

4. Rennett Stowe via flickr.

Food and Media Companies Lobby to Weaken Guidelines on Marketing Food to Children

Posted on by Corporations and Health Watch

A major lobbying push by a powerful group of food and media companies appears to be working, with a federal agency indicating it would back off on parts of proposed voluntary guidelines for marketing food to children. The guidelines are meant to combat childhood obesity. In a report for the Sunlight Foundation published earlier this month, Nancy Watzman found that in 2011, 26 food and beverage and media companies spent more than $37 million on lobbying the federal government on food and marketing issues.

Surge in Gun Ownership Boosts Gun Industry

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Bloomberg News reports that domestic handgun production and imports more than doubled over four years to about 4.6 million in 2009, citing the National Shooting Sports Foundation, a gun-industry trade group. In addition, reports USA Today, on this year’s Black Friday, the holiday shopping bonanza that follows Thanksgiving, gun retail sales surged to 129,166, far surpassing the previous single day high of 97,848 on Black Friday of 2008.

Big Alcohol‘s Global Playbook: New markets, reduced regulation and lower taxes

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As the global alcohol industry becomes increasingly concentrated in a few big international companies, its practices around the world become remarkably similar. Public health professionals seeking to reduce the harm from alcohol can benefit from documenting and analyzing these trends and from studying the efficacy of differing responses. Several recent reports illustrate these convergences.

Developing New Markets

To expand, a company needs to develop new markets. In recent years, changing tastes in alcohol consumption, the global recession, and continuing competition from other multinationals as well as smaller national companies have created a fierce battle for recruiting new cohorts of drinkers.

Two attractive markets for the alcohol industry are youth drinkers, who promise to become lifetime customers, and women, who constitute the half of the world’s population that still drinks less.

In an article in the January issue of the American Journal of Public Health, James Mosher describes how Diageo, the world’s largest producer of distilled spirits, has used the Smirnoff brand of vodka to attract new youth drinkers. By developing alcopops, beverages that taste like soft drinks, including new fruit flavors, competing with beer makers to win over young drinkers, and engaging in active lobbying to win favorable regulatory rules for these new beverages, Diageo has seen its Smirnoff vodka sales take off.

In Canada and the United States, wine makers have targeted women, especially “Moms,” with new wine brands such as Mommy’s Time Out, MommyJuice and Girl’s Night Out. In an article in the Toronto Star last month, Ann Dowsett Johnston analyzed the growth of women-targeted alcohol advertising, examining  the new wine brands, alcopops, and the various vodka drinks produced for women. In an interview with the Star, CHW Contributing Writer David Jernigan, the executive director of the Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth at Johns Hopkins University said, “In the past 25 years, there has been tremendous pressure on females to keep up with the guys. Now the industry’s right there to help them. They’ve got their very own beverages, tailored to women. They’ve got their own individualized, feminized drinking culture. I’m not sure that this was what Gloria Steinem had in mind.”

Influencing Governments, Coopting Regulations

Logo of Alcohol Concern, a UK advocacy group

Another strategy Big Alcohol uses to advance its business interests is to weaken and coopt government’s regulatory apparatus to better meet its needs. National leaders in business-friendly states are often eager to help. In New Zealand, for example, the government last month appointed Katherine Rich, CEO of the Food and Grocery Council, to the new Health Promotion Agency Establishment Board, an entity that replaces the Alcohol Advisory Council of New Zealand, the Health Sponsorship Council and some health promotion activities of the Ministry of Health. Professor Doug Sellman of Alcohol Action New Zealand observed that “Katherine Rich has been one of the most vociferous defenders of the alcohol industry’s desire to continue to pour as much alcohol into New Zealand society as it can. [She] has used her role as an industry spokesperson to attack community groups advocating a stronger Alcohol Reform Bill for the sake of the health of New Zealanders.”

In the United Kingdom, the Conservative government initiated the “Public Health Responsibility Deal for Alcohol,” an industry-public partnership that seeks to “foster a culture of responsible drinking.”  These Responsibility Deals develops voluntary industry pledges. According to a recent analysis in the Globe, the newsletter of the Global Alcohol Policy Alliance, “the critics of the pledges say they are not based on evidence of what works, and were largely written by Government and industry officials before the health community was invited to join the proceedings.” As a result, many health and advocacy organizations have refused to participate in the process.

Reducing Taxes

Another way that Big Alcohol companies maintain their profits is by finding ways to pay less tax. According to the global watchdog organization Tackle Tax Havens, SAB Miller, a leading global London-based brewing conglomerate, uses transfer pricing to avoid paying taxes in many countries. SAB Miller has 65 tax haven companies and its tax avoidance strategies are estimated to reduce the company’s global tax bill by as much as 20 percent, giving the company an advantage over local competitors who do pay national taxes and depriving national governments of needed revenue. Tackle Tax Havens estimates that SB Miller’s tax planning strategies have lost the treasuries of developing nations up to 20 million pounds, enough to put a quarter of a million children in school. Its turnover in 2009 was 12 billion pounds and its pretax profits 16 percent.

In the United Kingdom, the new business-friendly Conservative government reversed a 10 percent increase in the duty on hard cider, again depriving the government of revenues and losing an opportunity to reduce problem drinking. In Scotland, on the other hand, the government has proposed a new minimum price per unit on alcohol, a move intended to discourage volume discounts that serve as loss leaders for alcohol companies but encourage heavy drinking among vulnerable populations.

In sum, Big Alcohol companies are using a variety of strategies to advance their business interests, from targeting new markets and coopting and weakening regulations to opposing new taxes or lowering existing ones. These practices promote the health of their bottom lines but not of the population in the nations where they do business.

 

Image Credits:

1. MommyJuice

2. Alcohol Concern

3. ActionAidUK

McDonalds Fined in Brazil for Happy Meal Toy Giveaways

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According to Ad Age, McDonald’s is being fined $1.8 million by the government of Sao Paulo for giving away toys with Happy Meals, following a complaint by a consumer defense group, reported Brazilian trade publication Meio & Mensagem, Ad Age’s editorial partner in Brazil. The Instituto Alana, a Brazilian nonprofit, claimed that the free toy with a McLanche Feliz (“Happy Meal” in Portuguese) “distorts values” and encourages “unhealthy eating habits” among children. The institute’s Children and Consumption Project filed a complaint with Procon-SP, part of the Sao Paulo government’s Department of Justice and Defense of Citizens.

Brazil Widens War on Tobacco

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Fox News Latino reports that the Brazilian government is a presidential signature away from passing a law that would not only ban smoking in enclosed public places nationwide, but also further extend smoking restrictions. The new law makes it illegal to light up in smoking rooms, in airports and bars, bans cigarette advertisements everywhere cigarettes are sold, and increase taxes on cigarettes by up to 300 percent.

Toying with the Happy Meal: Is McDonald’s evading the law?

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Cross-posted from Grist.

While most media outlets dubbed it the “Happy Meal toy ban,” the ordinance passed in San Francisco last year didn’t ban anything. The law just placed a few reasonable nutrition guidelines (a maximum of 600 calories per meal and limits on fat and salt, for example) for restaurants using free toy incentives to lure kids into a lifetime of bad eating habits. In a rare victory for children’s health, the bill passed despite heavy lobbying by McDonald’s.

The law is scheduled to go into effect today, but the fast food giant — who didn’t want to change the nutritional makeup of its Happy Meals — has devised a clever gimmick to maintain the status quo.

Instead of giving the toys away for free, parents will now pay 10 cents for the latest plastic action figure. And for bonus PR, the dime will be donated to the city’s Ronald McDonald House.

Some media outlets have claimed that McDonald’s has successfully found a loophole, or has dodged or skirted the law. And it may look that way on the surface, but I’m not so sure.

It’s not clear to this lawyer that the clown trick is in full compliance with the law. What has really changed and how exactly will this new 10-cent rule play out at the cash register? Is McDonald’s HQ requiring its San Francisco franchises to ask if a parent would like to pay 10 cents extra for the toy? Even if they are, the reality is that the Happy Meal business model depends on toys being automatically included.

Fast food outlets manipulate so-called “default options” on the menu to ensure maximum sales. For example, when you order a “combo meal” it’s likely to automatically come with a soda — not, say, juice or milk — because soda has higher profit margins.

McDonald’s is determined to keep Happy Meals tied to toys, because a new toy every week ensures repeat business (and repeated nagging). The easiest way to do this is to include the toy as the default option. If parents started refusing the toys, it would defeat the entire purpose of the Happy Meal: to fulfill the company’s (likely very lucrative) contractual agreements with media companies that require them to cross-promote the latest movie, kids’ TV show, etc.

It’s no wonder then, that McDonald’s is so desperate to retain the toys. But is this true compliance with a law that was meant to disassociate toys from unhealthy food? I don’t think so.

McDonald’s has a history of acting irresponsibly, despite its claims to the contrary. For example, the company proudly touts its membership in the Children’s Food and Beverage Initiative. Through this voluntary, self-regulatory trade group, the company makes numerous claims about how responsible its child marketing policy is, including:

McDonald’s is proud of our long heritage of responsible communication with our customers, especially children, and continues to play a leadership role in the development of standards that govern advertising for children and adults.

However, an in-depth investigation by the Rudd Center on Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University found that McDonald’s has failed to live up to its voluntary pledge — in numerous ways. For example, the study found that McDonald’s increased its TV advertising from 2007 to 2009, with preschoolers seeing 21 percent more ads for McDonald’s and older children viewing 26 percent more.

The Rudd Center study also found:

  • McDonald’s web-based marketing (on Ronald.com) is aimed at children as young as 2.
  • McDonald’s 13 websites attracted 365,000 unique child visitors and 294,000 unique teen visitors on average each month in 2009.
  • African American teens viewed 75 percent more TV ads for McDonald’s compared to white teens.

All this is despite McDonald’s “commitment to responsible marketing to children.”

The Rudd Center also found that this type of marketing works. Forty percent of parents reported their child asks to go to McDonald’s at least once a week, with 15 percent of preschoolers asking to go every day. Wonder why? Toys play a huge part in that incessant asking. The fact that McDonald’s is so determined to keep toys shows just how huge.

Can’t parents just say no? Of course they can, but both ideas can be true: Parents need to set limits and McDonald’s needs to stop marketing to children. As ample science tells us, marketing to young children is inherently deceptive because they do not have the cognitive capacity to understand that they are being targeted. Therefore, under both federal and state law, marketing to young children is already illegal. (Read my previous article for the full legal explanation.)

As I see it, voluntary pledges are a dismal failure. Only better laws enforced over time will change the behavior of companies like McDonald’s. And when advocates do get laws passed to protect kids, McDonald’s will keep trying to avoid them. But we don’t have to let them get away with it. Here’s how you can get involved:

  1. If you live in San Francisco, contact San Francisco Supervisor Eric Mar’s office (the author of the bill) and tell him not to allow the City to accept this move by McDonald’s. San Francisco may still be able to fix the law with new language or change how it is enforced.
  2. Contact the San Francisco city attorney’s office to tell them the same thing.
  3. If you live elsewhere in California, contact the state attorney general’s office, which has authority to enforce consumer deception laws. If you live outside of California, you can find your state attorney general listed here.
  4. File a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission, the agency responsible for regulating advertising at the federal level. Deceptive marketing is already illegal, and marketing to young children is inherently deceptive.
  5. File a complaint with the industry-sponsored Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative about McDonald’s irresponsible marketing practices.
  6. Just for fun, contact McDonald’s to tell them what you think.
  7. Finally, support nonprofits that are working to hold companies like McDonald’s accountable. The two I recommend are The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and Corporate Accountability International.

It’s clear this company won’t improve on its own. Maybe it’s time to Occupy McDonald’s?

 

Image Credit:

klavinka via flickr.

How the Food Industry Eats Your Kid’s Lunch

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In an opinion essay in the New York Times, Lucy Komisar describes an increasingly cozy alliance between companies that manufacture processed foods and companies that serve the meals in public schools. This partnership, she writes, “is making students — a captive market — fat and sick while pulling in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits. At a time of fiscal austerity, these companies are seducing school administrators with promises to cut costs through privatization. Parents who want healthier meals, meanwhile, are outgunned.”

Global NGOs Call on Namibia to Stand Strong against Tobacco Industry Bullying

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In response to British American Tobacco (BAT)’s threats to sue the government of Namibia, a global network representing more than 50 countries is calling on the government to make public health a priority and stand strong in the face of industry bullying. The Network for Accountability of Tobacco Transnationals (NATT) sent a letter to Minister of Health and Social Services Dr. Richard Kwemi urging the government to protect current and future generations from tobacco addiction, disease, and death. NATT members are also calling on Dr. Kwemi to invoke Article 5.3 of the global tobacco treaty (formally known as the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control), which obligates ratifying countries to protect their health policies from tobacco industry interference, as a tool to stand up to BAT.