Almost 50 years ago Ralph Nader published Unsafe at Any Speed, an indictment of the safety record of the automobile industry and General Motors in particular. Last week, reports the New York Times, General Motors recalled nearly 1.4 million cars in the United States, saying that the ignition switches on Cobalts and other brands can shut off a car’s engine and electrical system, and disable its air bags. At least 13 deaths have already been linked to the problem, which the Times called, “a decade-long failure by G.M. and the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to address a problem that engineers and regulators had been alerted to years ago.”
Industry Voices Dominate the Trade Advisory System
The Obama administration’s corporate-heavy network of official trade advisers has emerged as a point of sharp contention in a process that has been criticized by members of Congress and others as low on public transparency. In a series of infographics, the Washington Post shows the corporate and other ties of the 566 individuals who work with the Obama administration to establish trade policy.
How Washington Dooms Millions of Americans to Premature Death
Re-posted from The Daily Beast
Lost in the vitriolic debate over Obama’s health reforms is the simple fact that tobacco, alcohol, and bad food are the leading killers in America. Professor Nicholas Freudenberg on why we need to change our consumption if we’re going to get healthier.
While it’s unrealistic to expect that recent successes in enrolling more people into health insurance will diminish the health care debates in Congress any time before November’s elections, Washington’s obsession with ObamaCare has made the nation lose sight of other strategies for improving health and reducing health care costs.
Advances in public health require not only getting more people insured, but also finding ways to turn off the faucets that are sending floods of Americans with chronic diseases into our emergency rooms, hospitals—and morgues. Chronic diseases cause 7 out of every 10 deaths in the United States and 49% of Americans have one or more chronic diseases. They account for $3 of every $4 spent on healthcare—about $1.5 trillion annually.
The World Health Organization has identified three drivers of the global rise in chronic diseases—excess consumption of tobacco, alcohol and high fat, sugar, and salt foods. According to a recent study by University of Washington researchers, tobacco, alcohol and diet cause more than 1.2 million annual premature deaths in the United States from heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, and other conditions.
Corporations and their allies claim that choices around food, alcohol and tobacco are a matter of individual responsibility, not public policy. But this argument doesn’t explain why the prevalence of diabetes has increased 176% in the last 30 years. And it is contradicted by researchers’ estimate that prevention campaigns, higher tobacco taxes and smoking bans have prevented 8 million premature deaths and extended the average lifespan for the people who did not take up smoking by on average almost 20 years.
We need a better balance between the constitutional protection of commercial speech and a corporation’s responsibility not to misrepresent the health benefits of their products.
To bring about similar advances will require not only spending more on prevention but also creating policies that make it more difficult for tobacco, alcohol and food companies to design products and marketing campaigns that contribute to premature death and preventable illnesses. Critics rightly point out that less than a dime of every health care dollar we spend goes to prevention.
But the bigger problem is how much our society spends on promoting disease. Each year the tobacco, alcohol and food industries spend more than $25 billion marketing their products. That’s more than twice the annual expenditures for the entire Centers for Disease Control. As tobacco, alcohol and food companies lose white middle class customers—either to healthier choices or premature death—they ramp up their advertising to new market segments such as women, children, Blacks and Latinos. By targeting these populations, they hope to grow their bottom line and recruit new life-time customers. But what’s good for business is bad for health. A 2013 study found that in some places in the US, women’s longevity has worsened, in part because of tobacco, food and alcohol consumption.
An article published in JAMA Internal Medicine last week further undermines the “people make stupid choices” argument. Researchers found that compared to people who obtained less than 10% of their calories from added sugar, those who obtained more than 25% from this source were almost 3 times more likely to die of cardiovascular disease. Where does that added sugar come from? Not from the sugar we spoon on our cereal or into our coffee. The highest proportion (37.1%) comes from sugary beverages. Customers don’t choose how much sugar to add to their soda—they pick what’s on the shelf. And despite some feel-good commitments to health from Coca Cola and PepsiCo, it’s still sugary soda that drives these companies’ profits— and their marketing dollars.
The public health message is clear: if Americans consumed less added sugar fewer would die prematurely. But last week PepsiCo rejected calls to sell its North American beverage business. Rather, it decided to double down on selling sugary drinks. PepsiCo’s CEO explained to investors that “snacks and beverages purchased and consumed together” helped grow business. In other words, if the company can persuade consumers to quench the thirst its salty FritoLays produce with Pepsi, they can increase sales. Pepsi estimated it earned up to a billion dollars from such “synergies” which also contribute to more diabetes and salt-induced hypertension.
What policy approaches could make it harder for corporations to profit at the expense of public health? Strengthening corporations’ duty to disclose what they know about the health effects of their products would help consumer make informed choices. On the legal front, we need a better balance between the constitutional protection of commercial speech and a corporation’s responsibility not to misrepresent the health benefits of their products. Misleading corporate health claims are the slow-motion equivalent of falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater. Another goal is to make it harder for corporations to pass on to tax payers and consumers the health care costs their products generate. The success of the fast food, gun, pharmaceutical and other industries in getting Congress to limit the rights of injured consumers to file class action lawsuits are steps in the wrong direction. Finally, turning off the faucets of marketing that produce our flood of chronic disease will require a more level political playing field by limiting corporate campaign contributions, lobbying and revolving door employment.
In all likelihood, our national health discussion will continue to be dominated by debates on software for healthcare.gov or whether to delay enrollment deadlines. But by failing to consider more upstream solutions for preventing disease and reducing health care costs, Washington is dooming millions of Americans to premature death.
Nicholas Freudenberg, a Professor at the City University of New York School of Public Health and Hunter College is the author of Lethal But Legal: Corporations, Consumption, and Protecting Public Health.
Pharmaceutical Company to Pay Massachusetts $724,000 Over Claims of Illegal Marketing
A manufacturer of pharmaceutical products has agreed to pay more than $724,000 to the Massachusetts Medicaid program over allegations of unlawful marketing practices aimed at promoting the drug Lidoderm for conditions not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Attorney General Martha Coakley announced. The global settlement with Endo Pharmaceuticals, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Endo Health Solutions, resolves civil allegations that it illegally marketed Lidoderm for use in connection with lower back pain or chronic pain. The FDA approved Lidoderm only for the treatment of pain associated with post-herpetic neuralgia, more commonly known as “shingles.”
‘We Need the iPhone of Guns’: Will Smart Guns Transform the Gun Industry?
One of California’s largest firearm stores recently added a peculiar new gun to its shelves, reports the Washington Post. It requires an accessory: a black waterproof watch. Electronic chips inside the gun and watch communicate with each other. A dream of gun control advocates for decades, the Armatix iP1 is the country’s first smart gun. Its introduction is seen as a landmark event in efforts to reduce gun violence, suicides, and accidental shootings.
The Fallacy of Marketing ‘Healthy’ Food to Youths
Cross-posted from Al-Jazeera Opinion
Michelle Obama is probably the most popular first lady in recent memory, with approval ratings embarrassingly higher than her husband’s, at least in 2012. She is the picture of health, speaks openly about the challenges of raising two daughters and feeding them right and uses her platform to call attention to the country’s childhood obesity crisis through her Let’s Move program.
And yet, with all this going for her, even she cannot make a serious dent in the problem of how food and media corporations are targeting children with junk-food advertising. So instead, she has turned to the easier task of getting a few corporations to pledge to market so-called healthy food to children. First came the announcement with Disney in 2012 that food advertised on its radio and TV channels would have to meet Disney’s nutrition guidelines, and then last fall a deal with Sesame Workshop, the producer of the children’s television show “Sesame Street,” to license its characters to help the Produce Marketing Association promote fruits and vegetables to children. Just last month came the latest pledge, from Subway, which will offer a new kids’ menu and stress healthier eating through an expansive child- and family-focused marketing campaign.
These large-scale commitments may sound great, but here’s the rub: Public-health advocates haven’t been asking for more food marketing to children. Rather, for years — even decades — the aim has been to get the marketing to stop.
Obama is well aware that junk-food marketing to kids is at the heart of the childhood obesity problem. At the inception of the Let’s Move program in 2010, she sternly lectured the junk-food industry’s trade group, the Grocery Manufacturers Association, “not just to tweak around the edges.” In September, at a gathering at the White House, she had a surprisingly blunt message to food marketers:
You all know that our kids are like little sponges. They absorb whatever is around them. But they don’t yet have the ability to question and analyze what they’re told. Instead, they believe just about everything they see and hear, especially if it’s on TV. And when the average child is now spending nearly eight hours a day in front of some kind of screen, many of their opinions and preferences are being shaped by the marketing campaigns you all create. And that’s where the problem comes in.
She even called on the industry “to empower parents instead of undermining them as they try to make healthier choices for their families.” Well said.
Despite her best efforts, however, curbing junk-food marketing to children is not something the first lady can fix. She is simply in the wrong wing of the White House. Meanwhile, the West Wing has shown little willingness to stand up to the junk-food industry. An effort by four federal agencies to enact better nutrition standards for how food is marketed to children — which, even if passed, would have been only voluntary and therefore unenforceable — was scuttled in 2011 by corporate lobbyists. Barack Obama’s administration has been silent on the matter ever since, apparently content to let the first lady host happy press conferences with Elmo and Rosita from “Sesame Street.”
While Let’s Move grabs headlines, the public discourse has shifted away from the much more important policy discussion at stake: the food industry’s failed attempt to self-regulate. Ignoring food advocates’ repeated calls for increased accountability, fast-food leaders, such as McDonald’s and Burger King, routinely violate pledges of responsible marketing to children, as do cereal giants, such as General Mills. Even in the school environment, where Michelle Obama’s efforts have had some positive impact (e.g., improvements to meal guidelines), junk-food marketing remains a significant problem, as recent research has shown, further demonstrating the weakness (PDF) of self-regulatory pledges from industry. It is not enough to have better nutrition guidelines on school meals when corporations are deliberately targeting schoolchildren in order to build brand loyalty for life. According to a study conducted by researchers at the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois, most students, from elementary to high schools, are “exposed to commercialism aimed at obtaining food or beverage sales or developing brand recognition and loyalty for future sales.”
Making false promises about marketing to children may even have legal implications. In most states as well as under federal law, it is illegal to engage in false or deceptive advertising, which can include when a corporation reneges on a voluntary pledge to behave responsibly.
A focus on healthy-food marketing also distracts us from facing what is fundamentally wrong about corporations targeting children for profit-making. As Susan Linn, the author of “Consumer Kids,” and I argued in June, any type of marketing to kids is inherently deceptive because children lack the cognitive capacity to understand how marketing works, making the practice potentially illegal and, at the least, unethical.
Furthering this concern, Josh Golin, associate director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, tells me that from a commercialization standpoint, the “Sesame Street” approach to using characters to market fresh produce is a “terrible idea.” He notes that “the produce aisle was literally the only place in a grocery store where children weren’t being targeted — and where parents could get a respite from the nagging that marketers covet in every other aisle.” He also says that Let’s Move has the wrong priorities. “If you got rid of junk-food marketing and also did vegetable marketing, you’d have a chance. But slapping Elmo on some bananas is not going to compete with sugary, salty, highly processed food with another character on a way-cooler package with a big TV campaign and an advergame to support it.” (Advergames are games on websites, such as HappyMeal.com, aimed at getting kids to play online while immersed in an advertising environment, where they are especially susceptible.)
Similarly, Let’s Move’s partnership with Subway is unlikely to prove effective and may even do more harm than good. The largest fast-food company (in terms of outlets) is already known for falsely creating a healthy halo — giving the impression of health to cover up the junk. Most of Subway’s offerings are meat-heavy and overly processed. (Its new Fritos Chicken Enchilada Melt is just one example.) A recent petition asked Subway to remove from its bread a chemical called azodicarbonamide, which is also used in plastics. The company says it will, but details are sketchy.
Since Subway wasn’t marketing to children before, few advocates in public health were complaining about it. But now, as the White House announcement notes, the three-year deal represents Subway’s “largest kid-targeted marketing effort to date,” including a promise to “deliver $41 million in media value.”
Meanwhile, food and media corporations, including McDonald’s, General Mills and Nickelodeon (the leading channel where marketers target children), are engaging in business as usual, exploiting children with harmful and deceptive messages about what they should eat. Children do not need more marketing to get them to eat well; they just need the junk-food peddlers to stop undermining parents.
No one in Washington is even talking about these companies’ tactics. Instead, Let’s Move is engaging in quasi-public-policy-making without the usual democratic checks and balances, such as getting input from multiple stakeholders — or the public, for that matter. But the blame for that lies less with the first lady and more with the president and a hopeless Congress for placing corporate interests above children’s health. Is our federal government so broken that a press conference with the Muppets is the best we can hope for?
Michele Simon is a public health lawyer, president of Eat Drink Politics, and author of “Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back.”
Tobacco Lobbying on the Rise Throughout New York
The Wall Street Journal writes that a report by the New York Public Interest Research Group released Wednesday says that the tobacco industry spent $7 million in the first half of 2013 on tobacco lobbying and campaign donations, more than it did on during 2011 and 2012 combined. NYPIRG reports that Altria, formerly Philip Morris, spent the most, with more than $4 million on lobbying and more than $300,000 on campaign contributions. Altria spokesman David Sutton says the company participates in policy-making that could affect it, shareholders and consumers.
Drug Company Staff Fretted When In-house Paper’s Conclusion Clashed with Marketing Claims
The Lancet reports that when employees at the German drug firm Boehringer Ingelheim learnt that the conclusions of a company study clashed with a marketing claim that its new anticoagulant did not need monitoring, they sought to have the paper revised and even questioned whether it should be published at all, internal company documents released by a US court indicate. One employee complained that the paper would harm the company’s marketing efforts and make discussions with regulatory agencies more difficult. “Can’t this be avoided?” the employee asked.
In Rapid Turnaround, Toyota Is on Track to Post Record Earnings
Last week, reports the New York Times, Toyota hit a milestone in its comeback, saying it was on pace to earn its biggest-ever annual profit in its current fiscal year. It is a rapid turnaround for a company that nearly lost its reputation for quality when millions of its cars were recalled for problems with unintended acceleration. Under its chief executive, Akio Toyoda, the company has hastened cost cuts, streamlined its global organization chart and increased its emphasis on newer models, flashy designs and fuel economy. The company has also continued to resolve lawsuits stemming from the recalls. While American automakers have made drastic comebacks since the recession, no car company has had a bigger revival than Toyota.
Australian Labor Party Questions Removal of Nutrition Website
Australia’s 7News reports that the opposition Labor Party has pressed Assistant Health Minister Fiona Nash on her chief-of-staff’s links to the food industry, after the controversial removal of a Health Department website last week. Senator Nash said she ordered her department to take down the website, which promoted a new star rating system for food labels. The Commonwealth, states and territories all endorsed a new voluntary food labeling system at the end of last year. While the food and drink manufacturing body, the Food and Grocery Council, has been resisting the introduction of the system, consumer advocates have pushed for it.
Corporations and Health Watch 