Tracking the effects of corporate practices on health
Food & Beverage
The food and beverage industries supply the world’s population with the food they need to sustain life, but they also contribute to diet-related diseases, rapidly becoming the leading cause of global premature deaths and preventable illnesses, and also to food insecurity and malnutrition. This sector includes food and beverage retailers, distributors, manufacturers, food service and restaurants, food growers and agricultural supply companies.
In recent weeks, the food industry has responded forcefully to efforts by advocates and regulators to advance new policies to create healthier food environments. For example, the soda industry has begun a concerted legal effort to stop or slow public health campaigns on the adverse effects of sugar-sweetened beverages. According to Reuters, the soda industry and its attorneys have filed at least six document requests with public agencies from California to New York. “It is, in our opinion, an effort to overwhelm or smother government employees, who already have too much to do,” Ian McLaughlin, an attorney at the National Policy & Legal Analysis Network to Prevent Childhood Obesity in Oakland, California, told Reuters.
And in response to the Federal Trade Commission’s proposal for voluntary guidelines for food marketing to children, the nation’s largest food and drink marketers are developing their own campaign to avoid public oversight.
In these and other policy debates, the food industry relies on a network of trade association, law firms and lobbying groups to advance its case. In order to help CHW readers better understand the web of organizations, I present in the table below brief descriptions of a few of the largest trade associations, for the most part in their own words.
The American Beverage Association, says its website, is a trade organization that represents the beverage industry in the United States. Its members include producers and bottlers of soft drinks, bottled water, and other non-alcoholic beverages. ABA was founded in 1919, and originally named the American Bottlers of Carbonated Beverages. In 1966, it renamed itself the National Soft Drink Association. Then in November 2004, it changed to its current name, “to better reflect the expanded range of nonalcoholic beverages the industry produces.”
Americans Against Food Taxes, reports its website, is a coalition of concerned citizens – responsible individuals, financially strapped families, small and large businesses in communities across the country – opposed to the government tax hikes on food and beverages, including soda, juice drinks, and flavored milks. Its lead sponsor is the American Beverage Association. The mission of the coalition is two-fold: 1) To promote a healthy economy and healthy lifestyles by educating Americans about smart solutions that rely upon science, economic realities and common sense; and 2) To prevent the enactment of regressive and discriminatory taxes that will not teach our children how to live a healthy lifestyle, and will have no meaningful impact on public health, but will have a negative impact on American families struggling in this economy. Its members include 7-Eleven, Inc., Burger King Corp., Domino’s Pizza, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, McDonalds, the National Association of Convenience Stores, Snack Food Association, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Wendy’s/Arby’s Group, Inc.
The Association of National Advertisers, says its website, is the advertising industry’s oldest trade association, founded in 1910 in Detroit, Michigan by 45 companies to “safeguard and advance the interests of advertisers and consumers.” Currently, the ANA leads the marketing community by providing its members insights, collaboration, and advocacy. ANA’s membership includes 400 companies with 10,000 brands that collectively spend over $250 billion in marketing communications and advertising.
The Grocery Manufacturers Association, says its website is “the voice of more than 300 leading food, beverage and consumer product companies that sustain and enhance the quality of life for hundreds of millions of people in the United States and around the globe. Based in Washington, D.C., GMA’s member organizations include internationally recognized brands as well as steadily growing, localized brands.” Founded in 1908, GMA is an active, vocal advocate for its members. The association and its member companies are committed to meeting the needs of consumers through product innovation, responsible business practices and effective public policy solutions developed through a genuine partnership with policymakers and other stakeholders.
The National Association of Convenience Stores is an international trade association representing more than 2,100 retail and 1,500 supplier company members. According to itswebsite NACS member companies do business in nearly 50 countries worldwide, with the majority of members based in the United States. The U.S. convenience store industry, with more than 146,000 stores across the country, posted $511 billion in total sales in 2009. NACS serves the convenience and petroleum retailing industry by providing industry knowledge, connections and advocacy to ensure the competitive viability of its members’ businesses.
The Snack Food Association (SFA), says its website is the international trade association of the snack food industry representing snack manufacturers and suppliers. Founded in 1937, SFA represents over 400 companies worldwide. SFA business membership includes, but is not limited to, manufacturers of potato chips, tortilla chips, cereal snacks, pretzels, popcorn, cheese snacks, snack crackers, meat snacks, pork rinds, snack nuts, party mix, corn snacks, pellet snacks, fruit snacks, snack bars, granola, snack cakes, cookies and various other snacks.
The United States Chamber of Commerce is the world’s largest business federation representing the interests of more than 3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions, as well as state and local chambers and industry associations. More than 96% of U.S. Chamber members are small businesses with 100 employees or fewer, says its website.
Campaign Contributions and Lobbying Expenditures of Selected Food Trade Associations
These organizations play an active role in campaign contributions and lobbying. In the table below, I report their total campaign contributions in the specified period and the percentage of these contributions that went to Democrats and to Republicans. The table also shows the total amount these organizations reported spending on lobbying in the period indicated and the main bills for which they have lobbied in recent years. The sources for these data are two databases created by theSunlight Foundation. The first, Influence Explorer, shows how specific organizations, companies, individuals and elected officials influence our political system. The second, Poligraft, enables visitors to paste in a newspaper article or other report and shows a detailed view of the connections between the individuals and organizations described in the article and their influence on our political system.
Lobbying
These organizations hire law and lobbying firms to advance their agenda. A review of the Sunlight Foundation databases shows several of the trade associations use the same lobbying firms. For example, the American Beverage Association, the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Association of National Advertisers together paid Patton Boggs LLP, the nation’s top ranked lobbying firm by revenues, almost $1.5 million in the intervals listed in the chart above. The US Chamber of Commerce and the Grocery Manufacturers of America together paid the law firm Akin Gump almost $3.5 million for lobbying in the last two decades, a time when that firm ranked second the in the nation for total lobbying revenues. The Chamber and the American Beverage Association paid the Bokorny Group more than $2.6 million. The table below describes these three lobbying firms, only a few of the many companies advancing the interests of Big Food in Washington.
Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP Akun Gump, according to Wikipedia, is a law firm founded in Dallas, Texas, in 1945 by Robert Strauss and Richard Gump. The firm now numbers more than 800 attorneys and advisers in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. Akin Gump’s work has been recognized by leading legal media and rating publications and organizations. In 2010, the firm was ranked as one of the nation’s top 20 corporate law firms by Corporate Board Member.
The Bockorny Group The Bockorny Group, according to its website is a bipartisan government affairs consulting firm specializing in a wide range of public policy areas with long standing relationships within the White House and on Capitol Hill. “We represent a diverse client base of major trade associations and Fortune 100 companies throughout the country. For over 20 years, the firm has weathered significant shifts in political party control as well as in ideology. In each instance, we look to adapt strategically while representing business needs with an adherence to the highest ethical and professional standards. Our vast amount of experience enables us to tailor a customized political and policy oriented strategy. This strategy can be the key to defeating a regulatory challenge or, in other cases, winning a legislative provision central to a company’s bottom line… The firm is one of the best when corporations or trade associations are in need of navigating legislative and regulatory terrain.”
Patton Boggs LLP For more than 40 years, says the firm’s website, Patton Boggs has maintained a reputation for cutting-edge advocacy “by working closely with Congress and regulatory agencies in Washington, litigating in courts across the country, and negotiating business transactions around the world. Our partners include women and men with extensive backgrounds in government service with strong ties to both major political parties, as well as top-flight litigators and individuals with a keen understanding of business and finance. Patton Boggs began as an international law firm concentrating in global business and trade in 1962. … We were among the first law firms to recognize that all three branches of government could serve as forums in which to achieve client goals, enabling us to emerge as the nation’s leading public policy law firm, and we have developed our extensive business law capabilities into the firm’s largest practice area.”
This brief overview of the food industry’s political operations shows the power and resources the industry has at its disposal. To advance their own agenda, nutrition and health advocates will need to develop strategies that turn these corporate assets into liabilities and their own limitations into assets. More on that in future CHW posts.
An Interview with Anna Lappé, Author of Diet for a Hot Planet.
Anna Lappé is a food writer and activist whose most recent book Diet for a Hot Planetexamines the role of our food system in human-induced climate change. A few weeks ago, Corporations and Health Watch writer Monica Gagnon interviewed Lappé about her book and her work. An edited version follows.
CHW: What drew you to researching and writing this book about the food and climate connection?
AL: I’ve been thinking about food and food systems for many years, and I was drawn to write this book because I have become aware of the impact of our global food system on our lives.
For instance, agriculture uses 70% of all fresh water on the planet and it is the single largest land user – about 40% of all land is either in ranching or farming. Agriculture is also the driving force behind the more than 400 dead zones in oceans around the world – places that become so polluted every year, mainly from agricultural runoff, that the aquatic life at the ocean floor is killed off by lack of oxygen.I was also starting to hear concern that our food yields would be affected by climate change. But what I wasn’t hearing was how agriculture is not just a victim but also a perpetrator of climate change: Our food system indirectly and directly is responsible for about one third of all greenhouse gas emissions. These facts were largely missing from the public conversation. So the book is my exploration of why it is that we haven’t heard more about the food system’s role in contributing to this crisis and how can our food system actually be transformed to become part of the solution to the climate crisis.
CHW: How is the climate crisis affecting public health?
AL: We typically don’t think about climate change as a public health problem, and yet we should. We know for instance that there are an increasing number of deaths around the world every year that can be tied, indirectly and directly, to the climate crisis, whether because of more extreme weather, more flooding, more drought, or the impact of climate change on food supply.
Farmers certainly are seeing that as our climate and weather patterns change, pests spread into regions where they were not as abundant, or were never found, before. As climates warm, more pests are able to survive through the winter and we’re seeing more pest pressures on farms.
CHW: What is the general response of food corporations to climate concerns?
AL: One of the things I found most interesting was exploring the corporate response to this crisis. I found a lot of parallels with the response from Big Oil and other industries that historically have been at the center of the crisis. I ultimately found myself frustrated that the responses weren’t more substantive. What we are seeing is that a lot of food companies are pushing to be their own police, not to have government regulation of the industry. For instance, in this country the livestock industry has been very successful in allowing producers who are raising livestock in concentrated animal feeding operations or CAFOs not to be regulated the way a factory would be around air emissions.
If we look at what companies are doing to reduce their carbon footprint, many aren’t taking the significant steps that they should. Instead, companies exaggerate how much they have transformed the bottom line, exaggerate how much of a difference they’re making, and underplay the real impact that they have.
In the book, I give the example of Tyson, one of the largest poultry producers in the country. In a recent sustainability report, Tyson devotes a whole section to boasting about how the company is providing resources for biodiversity conservation. They point to a 35-acre conservation area in Tennessee where Tyson protected ten bluebird nests. 35 acres? Ten bluebird nests? Counter that with the fact that Tyson, as a company, has had an enormous negative impact on biodiversity, whether it’s from the genetic uniformity of the birds raised in its factories, or the fact that the company has been found responsible for pollution from its poultry operations, paying millions of dollars in damages in various states. That’s just one example of what I saw throughout the food industry: exaggerating their environmental strides to deflect public outrage that would otherwise lead to stricter government regulation.
CHW: Do you think it’s accurate to say that, rather than denying there’s a problem, the industry is positioning itself as part of the solution?
AL: When we talk about the food industry we have to recognize it’s multi-faceted. Not every sector of the food industry has the same self-interest when it comes to addressing its environmental impact. For when we say “food industry,” we really mean the entire food chain: agribusiness companies that produce commodities, the building blocks of processed foods that end up in our supermarkets; livestock producers, say Tyson that’s involved with the poultry factory farming; companies like Coca Cola or PepsiCo; and food retailers, including one of the fastest growing food in this country: Walmart.
These players don’t always have the same self-interest and use different strategies of denying or acknowledging their impact on climate. For instance, initially, the American Meat Institute, a trade association, did not publicly address climate change concerns at all; there was a policy of silence. After I released my book, I noticed AMI released a statement on meat and climate change, denying that there was a significant connection and trying to minimize the impact of industrial meat production on the climate and the environment. In other words, AMI shifted from a strategy of silence to a strategy of denial. Others have taken a strategy of, “Hey if we’re part of the problem that means we can get compensated for being part of the solution, even if our solutions are on paper only.”
CHW: How does corporate advertising exacerbate the problem?
AL: Like other sectors,the food sector has used “green advertising”. I give an example in the book of going to an advertising industry conference sponsored by Advertising Age that had signs posted around the conference center with different taglines, and one I thought was very telling was “Low-carbon is the new fat-free.” Companies are getting it that more and more people are concerned about climate change and trying to spin their message in a way that resonates.
At this conference, Mary Dillon, an executive at McDonalds, described how the company is presenting this image of social responsibility. She gave the example of a recent Happy Meal initiative in Europe whose theme was protecting endangered species. Customers could collect each of five endangered species. The concept was that kids would buy not one but five Happy Meals in order to collect all these endangered species, and then would go online to take eco-actions on the McDonalds website. Of course. of the ways you could reduced your environmental footprint, I’m sure none said, “Please do not buy heavily processed food at McDonalds that is helping to contribute to environmental crises around the world.” That they would claim that somehow by purchasing this Happy Meal they you’re helping protect endangered species was beyond ironic.
And just two years earlier McDonalds had a very different Happy Meal campaign in the United States when they partnered with General Motors to sell Hummer-themed happy meals. They ended up selling 42 million of these Hummer-themed meals, each one with a different style and color. I suppose two years later McDonalds decided that it would be better for the public image not to align itself with the Hummer, a vehicle that had become the symbol of consumer excess and environmental destruction, and instead align itself with this image of protecting the environment.
CHW: What do you think is the corporate social responsibility to climate change, and do you think it’s ever going to happen?
AL: There’s a school of thought that says that companies’ entire “social responsibility” is to make profit – to return the highest return to shareholders. I adhere to a different school of thought, one that believes all corporations have an inherent responsibility to community and the environment. What, after all, does every company need to make profit? Use, and often abuse, our common resources. These shared commons no one company owns; no one company should be able to either use free of charge or abuse without remediating or paying for the damage. In order to run factory farms, for instance, Tyson pollutes the water, land, and air where its factories are located, whether it’s through leaching from waste cesspits or through noxious emissions from its operations.
”Social responsibility” is not adding an extra burden onto the shoulders of companies and asking them to do us all a favor by being more socially or environmentally responsible. It’s simply asking companies to operate in line with our collective values, including the belief that polluters should pay for polluting, that companies should give back to communities for those resources they use.
To me, the social-environmental responsibility question is just common sense; it’s expecting companies to simply do the bare minimum of what they should be doing.
CHW: How can consumers tell the difference between true corporate social responsibility and marketing ploys?
AL: Unfortunately, because we don’t have terribly strict regulations about claims that companies can and can’t make, it’s sometimes hard to know when you’re hearing the real deal. In the book I give examples of some green claims food companies are making and how to make sense of them. One of the resources I find very helpful is the Consumers Union program that evaluates green claims. It’s called greenerchoices.org and it helps you parse out, among all these claims, which are the ones you can trust.
If you are looking to reduce the carbon footprint of the food you eat, finding food that’s grown locally can be a choice that’s good for the climate. Also look for the USDA organic seal. Organic agriculture practices tend to reduce on-farm emissions, in some cases by as much as half. Organic production practices also for the most part don’t use synthetic chemicals.
So those are some of the things you can do, but since we live in a regulatory context where it’s easy for companies to greenwash their story and hard for consumers to detect misleading claims, a healthy dose of skepticism is always good.
CHW: What else can health advocates do to help change destructive corporate behavior?
AL: One of the things that health advocates can do is find ways to make their voices heard by coming together. A positive example of that kind of action has been the recent work by Corporate Accountability International and health advocates in every single state calling on McDonalds to discontinue the use of its Ronald McDonald character to lure children to their stores to consume foods that we know are highly problematic for public health.
CHW: What is the role of the EPA in providing information about food’s effect on climate change?
AL: In the book, I talk about how the meat industry quotes the EPA on food agriculture-related emissions to defend its claims that the food system isn’t a really big player in the crisis. It’s not that the data on this subject from the EPA is wrong, it’s that the data doesn’t describe the full spectrum of the food chain and the food system, so it doesn’t account for all the emissions associated with the food that we eat in this country. Food trade associations have taken those government statistics and misrepresented them as telling the full story of food to downplay the food-related emissions in the United States. In the book, for instance, I quote the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association using that EPA data to say that its producers are not really impacting the environment here and that environmentalists are exaggerating the impact.
CHW: What gives you hope that these unhealthy climate trends can be reversed?
AL: What gives me most hope is that there’s so much evidence now that sustainable or organic farming techniques, ways of growing food without relying on toxic chemicals or synthetic fertilizer or intensive animal operations, can produce high yields in some of the countries that are most hard hit by hunger. These production practices can also be relatively inexpensive to implement – they just require knowledge and training, not seeds, chemicals, or fertilizer. And these farming practices are showing that, on the farms that are implementing these practices, there’s higher carbon content in the soil. In other words we’re able to sequester carbon out of the atmosphere and into our farm soils if we implement these sustainable techniques. We’re finding that these farming practices greatly reduce on-farm energy use and overall on-farm emissions. And so we have this incredible potential for farming to help us mitigate the crisis, help us really reduce emissions in food production.
The other thing that gives me hope is we’re finding that these farming practices create more resilient farms that can handle droughts and floods better. I visited one organic farm in Wisconsin the summer the region was hit by floods that had devastated the many farmers there. But at New Forest Farms, the farmer Mark Shepard had lost only four percent of his crops; the rest were thriving because his soil was so healthy it acted as a sponge able to absorb the water. The biodiversity on his farm was a boon too: trees and shrubs lessened the impact of the pounding rain on the crops below. .
As I stood on his land, having just heard about the devastation of so many of the region’s farmers, I thought: “If more farms could look like this we would be in a much better place to feed the world in a climate unstable future.”
CHW: How can environment and health advocates work together on this issue? Are you seeing any of this happen in your travels and your research?
Anna Lappé
AL: We’re starting to see people make these connections. Environmental and health advocates are beginning to see themselves as being in the same boat, not working across purposes. They’re also really seeing how their other big allies are farmers. The source of public health is good food, clean water, and clean air. Farms run well, farms run sustainably, can help to preserve pristine groundwater. Whereas farms run as industrial operations where synthetic fertilizer is overused and leaches into the groundwater, industrial animal operations that end up housing massive manure cesspits that have very little protection to ensure that it doesn’t affect the groundwater. So farmers need to be brought into the conversation. As stewards of the land, sustainable farmers are at the forefront of helping us adapt to climate change, mitigate emissions, and bringing us the healthy food that is the cornerstone of public health.
According to the Washington Post, big food and media have hired former Obama Communications Director Anita Dunn to lead their battle against the government’s plan to create voluntary nutritional guidelines for food marketing to children. Participating companies include General Mills, Kellogg, PepsiCo, Nickelodeon and Time Warner as well as the US Chamber of Commerce. In a blog post, David Vladeck, director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection at the FTC, said he was surprised by the intensity of the industry reaction to the guidelines and worried about “misinformation.” His post dissects 12 “myths” regarding the proposed guidelines.
Are the new proposed guidelines for voluntary regulation of food advertising to children proposed by the Federal Trade Commission sensible health protection or a new intrusion by the nanny state? According to Republican Representative Jack King, voluntary guidelines soon become mandates. "What's voluntary today becomes a regulation tomorrow." He warns that a "nanny state" seeks to "regulate Honey Nut Cheerios." Margo Wootan of Center for Science in the Public Interest disagrees. "How do voluntary standards constitute government over-reach?" she asks.
For many good food advocates, the end of a legislative session often means disappointment that their bills to help fix our broken food system did not pass. But in some states, when lawmakers go home we should really all breathe a big sigh of relief.
Such was the case last week when the Iowa Legislature adjourned without passing one of the more obnoxious proposals to rear its ugly head in any state house this year. In the wake of video footage exposing the horrific conditions of animals raised for our consumption, agribusiness decided it was time to fight back.
Iowa House File 589 would have made it a crime to “produce” an image or sound recording at an animal facility without permission from the owner. To ensure that media outlets also got the message, even possession and distribution of such recordings would have been outlawed.
For the first offense, you could be charged with an “aggravated misdemeanor” while a second offense could bring felony charges. And that was just under the section, “animal facility interference.” You could also be brought up on charges of animal facility fraud, crop operation tampering, crop operation interference, and crop operation fraud, each with its own mind-bending definition.
Earlier this year, Minnesota and Florida introduced similar bills. New York jumped into the fray in June, the last month of the legislative session there. The New York bill, titled without a hint of irony, “unlawful tampering with farm animals,” threatened punishment up to one year in jail or a $1,000 fine.
While these bills are particularly egregious, it’s not the first time that Big Agribusiness has attempted to silence its critics through a state-by-state attack on free speech rights. In fact, one of the first op-ed articles I ever published was on the “veggie libel laws” that were passed in the late 1990s. These statues, which were enacted in at least a dozen states, essentially turned speaking negatively about any food into a potential libel lawsuit. It was under one such statute in Texas that Oprah Winfrey was sued by six cattle feeder corporations for doing a show on the risks of mad cow disease in beef. (She won the case.)
That state-by-state lobbying effort was also led by powerful agriculture interests able to find friendly legislators to do their bidding. Another familiar theme is how the ag gag bills are so obviously a violation of the First Amendment. At least two constitutional law experts (both in Iowa) agree that these measures are unlikely to withstand a court challenge. But that hardly seems to matter.
What does matter is that the message is sent loud and clear to anyone who seeks to expose the unspeakable atrocities that animals suffer daily on factory farms: that engaging in such reporting will have serious consequences. It’s called chilling speech.
The good news is that so far, no ag gag bill has passed. While some animal advocacy groups have hailed the failure in all four states where bills were introduced, I wouldn’t recommend a victory party just yet. Procedurally, the bills were not voted down or vetoed by any governor. Rather, they each passed through their respective committees and died before coming to a full chamber vote. A positive sign for sure, but still no guarantee the threat is over.
For example, in Iowa, the bill passed the House but was left to die without a full vote in the Senate. According to an interviewwith Iowa Rep. Jim Lykam (who is opposed), as a two-year bill, the measure doesn’t even have to be reintroduced for the Legislature to vote on it again, come January 2012. And Republican Gov. Terry Branstad is already on record in favor of the idea.
The lead sponsor in Iowa was Republican Rep. Annette Sweeney, a cattle rancher and former executive director of the Iowa Angus Association. Also on record in support of the bill are the Iowa Cattlemen’s Association and the Iowa Poultry Association. Other Big Ag backers according to one account included “Monsanto, DuPont, and other mammoth agriculture corporations and trade associations.”
Such heavy hitters don’t let one minor setback get them down. Dave Murphy, founder and executive director of Food Democracy Now — an advocacy group based in Iowa — agrees we should not get complacent. “Iowans were fortunate this year. Intense opposition and media scrutiny helped kill it in the end. This victory, however, is temporary as proponents are promising to reintroduce the bill next year,” he said.
This is what agribusiness does best: keep up the lobbying pressure wherever they can. Indeed, signs indicate that these bills are part of a nationally coordinated effort. For example, the language of the Iowa and Minnesota bills bear a striking resemblance, suggesting a state-by-state attack strategy – just like the veggie libel laws. The language of those earlier bills was virtually identical.
The sponsor of the Minnesota bill is Rep. Rod Hamilton, past president of the Minnesota Pork Producers. And, apparently, the bill was aided by the Minnesota Agri-Growth Council, a powerful agricultural lobbying group. Dayrn McBeth, president of the organization, explained their strategy: “Neither we nor the authors expect to pass these bills. It was intended to start a conversation.”
Or maybe stop one?
Here’s what I wrote in 1998: “These laws are nothing more than an effort by big business to chill the free speech efforts by those seeking to raise legitimate questions about the safety of our nation’s food supply.” Just add “and concerns about animal welfare” and it’s déjà vu all over again.
“Big Ag’s Latest Attempt to Chill Free Speech” was originally published at Food Safety News on July 7, 2011. Republished with permission from Food Safety News. C Marler Clark and Michele Simon. All rights reserved.
PepsiCo Inc, after falling into third place in US soda sales, is putting new emphasis on its main product, Pepsi, planning to expand soda advertising by 30% this year. According to the Wall Street Journal, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi is “facing doubts from investors and industry insiders concerned that her push into healthier brands has distracted the company from some core products.” Nooyi denies any change in overall strategy. “Good for you” products constitute only 20% of Pepsi’s revenues; the remainder comes from the high sugar, high salt “fun for you” products associated with obesity, diabetes and heart disease.
Jack in the Box has eliminated toys from children’s meals, winning the approval of consumer advocates who claim fast food corporations use the toys to attract kids to unhealthy meals. “We hope that McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and Taco Bell are paying attention to Jack in the Box, which has decided to stop using toys to market fast-food meals to children,” the Center for Science in the Public Interest said in a statement. “It’s too bad that McDonald’s, Burger King, Wendy’s, and Taco Bell think they can’t compete on the basis of quality, value, taste, or nutrition, but instead must resort to such a discredited marketing tactic to lure families to their businesses.” However, Ad Age notes that Jack in the Box rarely markets to kids and is a fraction of the size of McDonald’s.
Note: This post is a longer version of a correspondence that appeared in Lancet on August 13, 2011.
Alarmed that non-communicable diseases (NCDs), the world’s number one killer, now pose a growing threat to economic development, this September the United Nations General Assembly will convene its first High Level Meeting on NCDs in New York City. World leaders and public health officials will consider how to reduce the growing threat that cardiovascular disease, cancer, chronic respiratory disease and diabetes pose to population health, economic development and health care systems.
Non-Communicable Disease Alliance Briefing Paper for UN Meeting on NCDs
These conditions cause an estimated 35 million deaths annually; 80% occur in low and middle income countries and one quarter among people younger than 60 years of age. By 2030, NCDs will cause more than three quarters of all deaths in the world.
In preparation for the UN meeting, groups as varied as the NCD Alliance, a coalition of four global voluntary health organizations, the Commonwealth Heads of Government and theMillennium Development Goal Summithave proposed important but uncontroversial actions such as improving surveillance for NCDs, integrating NCD prevention and control into national health systems, making NCD prevention an economic development issue, and allocating more international assistance for NCDs.
The NCD Alliance has also recommended more controversial steps such as ratification and full and universal implementation of the WHO’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control and the elimination of “all forms of marketing, particularly those aimed at children, for foods high in saturated fats, trans-fats, salt and refined sugars.” The most pressing question facing the UN meeting is whether participants will be willing to tackle the corporate practices of the tobacco, food, alcohol, automobile and pharmaceutical industries that have so significantly contributed to the global spread of NCDs.
How Corporations Promote the Spread of NCDs
A growing body of evidence demonstrates that how corporations create, market, retail and price their products has contributed to increases in NCDs. For example, food and beverage makers market products high in fat, sugar, salt and calories; increase portion size; target children with ads and video games promoting unhealthy food; lobby for policies that make unhealthy foods cheaper than healthier ones and export their least healthy products such as sugar-sweetened beverages, fast food, cereals and snack foods to low and middle income countries. The result has been rising rates of diet-related NCDs.
The alcohol industry advertises aggressively to young and problem drinkers, contributing to liver diseases as well as injuries and violence. The industry uses its political clout to stop excise taxes that would discourage youth and problem drinking and sponsors ineffective “responsible drinking” campaigns that compete with under-funded effective approaches and emphasize individual rather than social responsibility for discouraging problem drinking. The automobile industry produces cars that fail to use available pollution control technology, opposes stricter standards for pollution control, and resists policies that favor cleaner public transportation. Increasing evidence links auto pollution with chronic respiratory disease, heart diseases and cancer.
Tobacco is predicted to contribute to one billion premature deaths in this century. The tobacco industry manipulates nicotine levels to make cigarettes more addictive and promotes its products, especially to women and young people in developing countries, their emerging markets. By increasing the rate of women’s smoking through targeted advertising, the tobacco industry has helped to shrink the longevity benefit that women have long enjoyed over men, a perverse way of reducing inequities.
Finally, while the pharmaceutical industry has developed drugs that have helped to control NCDs, it also promotes inadequately tested or dangerous drugs to treat NCDs and invests in developing minor variations of patented drugs that are profitable rather than in cheaper, safer and more effective alternatives.
While NCDs have multiple causes, a growing body of evidence shows that their burden on global health are inextricably linked to the practices of a small number of global companies in industries that are becoming increasingly concentrated. Ten multinational food companies account for 80% of the global food and beverage advertising. The three largest tobacco companies sell close to two-thirds of the world’s cigarettes and a few companies produce most of alcohol the world drinks. Thus, altering the practices and policies of a few dozen corporations could substantially improve the prospects for preventing and managing NCDs but this requires political leaders to demand changes in some of the world’s most powerful corporations.
Making Corporations Accountable
To date, the business world has been remarkably successful in avoiding responsibility for its role in NCDs. It does this by exploiting or manufacturing several myths about chronic disease. First, many people see NCDs as the inevitable consequence of economic development and population aging, the collateral damage of progress. But many people now develop NCDs in early and mid-adult years, so their rapid growth is not simply a function of aging populations. China, Egypt, Jamaica and Sri Lanka have NCD mortality profiles similar to the US and other developed nations, contradicting the view that NCDs are the unique curse of better off countries. Business benefits from portraying NCDs as the unavoidable corollary of aging and development because this view spares closer scrutiny of the role of corporate practices.
Second, conventional wisdom posits lifestyle as the primary cause of NCDs: if only people ate better, moved more, smoked less and consumed less alcohol, the world could prevent many deaths and lower the costs imposed by NCDs. As a result, NCD prevention focuses on programs designed to change health-related behavior, often one person at a time. Of course individuals’ health behavior contributes to NCDs. However, no evidence demonstrates that the world’s population has recently become more gluttonous or susceptible to addiction. What has changed is the behavior of the organizations that shape the environments in which people make health decisions. Global expenditures for advertising increased from $50 billion in 1950 to $570 billion in 2005. In the last few years the number of corporate lobbyists working in the capitals of the United States, the United Kingdom, the European Union and wherever international trade negotiations occur has skyrocketed, giving business a disproportionate voice in the policy decisions that shape health and lifestyle.
Corporations and their political supporters insist that business has an important role in shaping NCD policies and promote a third myth that voluntary corporate codes are the most effective tool for changing their health-damaging practices. Last summer, UK Health Secretary Andrew Lansley invited Mars, Cadbury and Coca Cola to play greater roles in the national anti-obesity initiative and the development of new food regulations. Corporate health leaders at Pepsi Cola and other companies have called for more private-public partnerships to address NCDs. However, their claim that voluntary agreements for corporate social responsibility suffice to protect public health is not supported by independent assessments of such codes in the food, alcohol and tobacco industries.
Calls for public sector collaboration with businesses fail to acknowledge that many companies profit from promoting NCDs. Corporate managers are legally required to maximize profits and too often depend on business models that exploit biological vulnerabilities (e.g., a craving for high fat, sugar and salt diets), addictions, or social insecurities. Some companies may temporarily benefit from selling healthier food or promoting more responsible drinking but in the long run increasing consumption and market share usually require promoting disease rather than health.
In the final analysis, if the UN meeting is to make progress in stopping the rise in NCDs, participants will need to find the backbone to stand up to corporate propaganda and lobbyists. Specific policies that could put a dent in the incidence of NCDs include: tighter restrictions on advertising unhealthy products; laws and taxes that discourage companies from transferring or externalizing the health costs of their products onto consumers or tax payers; legal corporate codes of conduct that require global companies to disclose known health effects of their products and practices; and stronger restrictions corporate lobbying and campaign contributions in order to provide health advocates with a more level political playing field. Absent forceful political mobilization by social movements, local governments and health professionals and their organizations, it is unlikely that businesses will agree to such a platform but will instead argue for the incremental, ineffective approaches they have advanced so far. Stay tuned for further developments.
For Further Reading
Beaglehole R, Bonita R, Horton R, et al. Priority actions for the non-communicable disease crisis. Lancet. 2011;377(9775):1438-47.
Cecchini M, Sassi F, Lauer JA, Lee YY, Guajardo-Barron V, Chisholm D. Tackling of unhealthy diets, physical inactivity, and obesity: health effects and cost-effectiveness. Lancet 2010;376 (9754):1775-84.
Freudenberg N, Galea S. The impact of corporate practices on health: implications for health policy. J Public Health Policy. 2008;29(1):86-104.
Geneau R, Stuckler D, Stachenko S, et al. Raising the priority of preventing chronic diseases: a political process. Lancet. 2010;376(9753):1689-98.
Monteiro CA, Levy RB, Claro RM, de Castro IR, Cannon G. Increasing consumption of ultra-processed foods and likely impact on human health: evidence from Brazil. Public Health Nutr. 2011;14(1):5-13.
World Health Organization. 2008-2013 Action Plan for the Global Strategy for the Prevention and Control of Noncommunicable Diseases, 2008.
Fast food and soda companies are attempting to make their products seem sleeker and healthier, according to a series of articles in Advertising Age.
McDonald’s, Burger King and Subway are all building redesigned stores, aiming to look more like restaurants and cafes than fast food joints. Meanwhile, PepsiCo is planning to lauch a mid-calorie beverage called “Pepsi Next.” The new drink is likely going to be marketed as a reduced sugar beverage, and the goal is for it to taste better to some consumers than diet soda. According to John Sicher, editor and publisher of Beverage Digest, “This is an attempt by Pepsi to come up with another tool to keep consumers in their cola franchise.”
It seems some thought I was a tad too harsh in my critique of the new MyPlate, the federal government’s latest attempt to teach Americans how to eat right. So in the spirit of recognizing positive moves coming from Washington D.C., here is some good news.
Last week, First Lady Michelle Obama announced the latest addition to her effort to reduce childhood obesity: Let’s Move Child Care, which includes a checklist for child day care providers to follow. The most impressive recommendation is to limit screen time. Specifically, to “none under age 2″ and for 2 and up, limit to 30 minutes/week during child care and no more than 1-2 hours/day of quality screen time at home.
First Lady Mrs. Obama unveiled the effort while visiting children at Centro Nia, a bilingual child care center in Washington, DC.
This is a very strong recommendation (backed by the American Academy of Pediatrics) and cannot have made the television industry or its advertisers very happy. And it could help reduce the negative impact of marketing because the earlier children form emotional bonds with cartoon characters, the sooner junk food pushers can exploit those connections. Remember that scene in the film Super Size Me when Morgan Spurlock showed how easily young toddlers recognized images of icons such as Ronald McDonald?
Kudos to the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood(CCFC) for its leadership on this issue. (Full disclosure, I am on their steering committee.) In recent years, CCFC has been fighting Disney over its controversial videos, Baby Einstein. The upshot of that battle was Disney changed its advertising claims.
We have certainly come a long way. Here’s what Let’s Move has to say on videos for babies:
Not too long ago, moms and child care providers all over the country were buying and showing videos and DVDs galore geared entirely toward the infant audience. But now we know that babies and even toddlers (ages 0 to 2 years old) shouldn’t get any screen time at all — zero, not even a few minutes here and there.
Take that Disney! (Here is CCFC’s statement applauding the first lady’s campaign.)
Other positive recommendations for day care centers include serving fruits or vegetables at every meal, avoiding fried foods, saying “so long to sugary drinks” and my favorite: just give kids water, imagine!
When it comes to keeping kids hydrated, it doesn’t get much better than plain old water. And it’s wise to serve toddlers and preschoolers only water at meals — so that they don’t get filled up with milk or juice, making it less likely they’ll have room to eat.
Did you hear that American Beverage Association and National Dairy Council?
Why is this a big deal? In addition to providing leadership and supporting parents, the Let’s Move campaign says it has already received commitments from the Department of Defense, General Services Administration, and the nation’s second largest childcare provider, Bright Horizons, to implement the checklist, which will impact the lives of more than 280,000 children.
And that, is a very good start.
You can watch the first lady’s video announcement here.
The United States Chamber of Commerce is the world’s largest business federation representing the interests of more than 3 million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions, as well as state and local chambers and industry associations. More than 96% of U.S. Chamber members are small businesses with 100 employees or fewer, says its website.
Corporations and Health Watch 