A reader in Australia writes that she “just came upon a doozy of an industry-funded paper.”

Title: Sales of Sugar-Sweetened Beverages in Australia: A Trend Analysis from 1997 to 2018, by William S. Shrapnel and Belinda E. Butcher.  Nutrients 2020, 12, 1016; doi:10.3390/nu12041016.

Conclusion: Major, long-term shifts are occurring in the market for non-alcoholic, water-based beverages in Australia, notably a fall in per capita volume sales of SSBs and an increase in volume sales of water. Both trends are consistent with public health nutrition strategies for obesity prevention and suggest that the downward trend in the percentage of dietary energy from added sugars in the Australian diet may be continuing.

Funding and Conflicts of Interest: This analysis was funded by an unrestricted grant from The Australian Beverages Council Ltd. The funders had no role in the design of the study; in the collection, analyses, or interpretation of data; in the writing of the manuscript, or in the decision to publish the results.

So what’s the problem here (besides the usual questions about the accuracy of the “no role” statement)?

The clue comes from an article in Food Navigator Asia: “Not a taxing question: Australian sugar sweetened beverage consumption slumps as obesity rates continue to soar.”

The article quotes a representative of the Beverage Council:

Obesity is multi-factorial, the reason why people become overweight and then obese, is because of the lack of physical activity, a sedentary lifestyle, and also poor diet…a sugar tax alone would not reduce the obesity rates in the country, and was a complex challenge for the government to overcome.  The beverage industry is against a sugar tax, and SSB tax.  The evidence and science behind the effectiveness of a sugar tax is weak.

Comment: The point of this study is to produce evidence against the value of soda or sugar taxes, even though sodas are still the largest source of sugars in Australian diets, and taxes have been shown to reduce consumption in other countries.  When it comes to sugary drinks, less is better.

Just for fun, here’s Healthy Food America’s 2019 map of countries with soda taxes.

The COVID-19 pandemic has pointed out how the higher risk of complications and death among members of minority groups.  The reasons are fairly well established.  Members of minority groups are more likely to:

• Be overweight
• Have diet-related risk factors: hypertension, type-2 diabetes, multiple metabolic problens
• Live in high-pollution areas
• Have asthma
• Suffer from the daily stress of discrimination
• Lack sick leave benefits
• Have poor health care

The .latest report from Rudd Center on Food and Obesity Policy, Sugary Drinks FACTS 2020, highlights how sellers of sugary drinks target their products to minority populations.  The press release says that the report found:

• In 2018, companies spent $84 million to advertise regular soda, sports drinks, and energy drinks on Spanish-language TV, an increase of 8% versus 2013 and 80% versus 2010.
• Sports drink brands disproportionately advertised on Spanish-language TV, dedicating 21% of their TV advertising budgets to Spanish-language TV, compared to 10% on average for all sugary drinks.
• Compared to White children and teens, Black children saw 2.1 times as many sugary drink ads and Black teens saw 2.3 times as many. Black youth exposure was particularly high for sports drinks, regular soda, and energy drinks.

Click here for the full report. 

• Sugary Drink FACTS 2020 Supplement: Examples of social media campaigns targeted to teens and Hispanic and Black youth
• Sugary Drink FACTS 2020 Appendix Tables
• Sugary Drink FACTS 2020 report summary

The report’s main finding:

CNN has an excellent account of this, in which I am quoted.

Experts say soda companies have also taken a page out of the tobacco industry’s marketing playbook, by providing funding for many Black communities and endeavors “in ways that don’t look like advertising, like funding playgrounds in minority neighborhoods, minority community groups, and sponsorship of Black and Hispanic sports figures,” said Marion Nestle, who also authored “Eat, Drink, Vote: An Illustrated Guide to Food Politics.”  “These work,” Nestle said. “Minority kids identify soda brands with sports figures, and minority community groups find it hard to oppose soda company marketing when the companies have been so generous.”

“The great irony of Ramon Laguarta’s promises to counter PepsiCo’s conscious or unconscious racist practices in the company, its business, and communities is that none of them addresses targeted marketing,” said Nestle.

“The best thing Pepsi could do to improve the health of its customers would be to stop advertising and marketing to children and teenagers, especially those of color,” Nestle added.

The USDA says 20 million food boxes have been delivered to food banks through the Farmers-to-Families program, which aimed to buy food from farms that had no way of selling what they produced, package it in boxes, and deliver them to food banks.  The announcement comes with a very long list of testimonials, and a video that you can watch here.

The USDA’s website about this is here.  The program is described here.

Not everyone is quite so enthusiastic.  The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition says that the food box program is not exactly doing much for small farms.

Most of the news coverage on the CFAP Food Box Program, and the Congressional attention that follows, has focused on large contracts awarded to companies without much experience in the distribution of specialty crops. This also caused the larger specialty crop industry to raise concerns about the early shortcomings of the program.

What has received much less attention has been how the program has or has not benefited local and regional food producers despite the fact that the program was clearly intended to support these farmers. Grant applicants were required to discuss how their proposed project supports the mission of facilitating agricultural markets and how they “intend to engage small farmers (e.g those farms servicing local and region interests and farmers markets).”

And Chuck Abbott, of FERN’s Ag Insider, says USDA offers few yardsticks for measuring its food-box program.

For USDA, the most important number in its food-box giveaway program is how many boxes are donated — 18.4 million as of Friday, according to a tally on the homepage of the agency that runs the program. Officials declined to provide other details, such as the average cost of the boxes or how long the $3-billion initiative will be in operation.

I would like to know:

• What’s in the boxes?
• What food?  How much food?
• What is its quality?
• How are food banks handling this?
• Are recipients happy with it?
• Is the program helping small farmers stay in business?

Does anyone know?  I haven’t seen answers to these questions yet.

The meat industry is in deep trouble.  Even industry insiders are taking it to task.

I could hardly believe this piece in Forbes by Hank Cardello.  It sounds just like something I would write.

3 Ways To Fix The Meat Industry’s Empathy Problem

The meat industry is antithetical to everything Millennials value. Their treatment of employees runs counter to Millennials’ No. 2 value: empathy, according to a Gallup report. Their role in global warming is antithetical to Millennials’ concern for the environment. Their price-fixing is antithetical to Millennials’ demand for transparency and decency. Their role in promoting products increasingly linked to global warming and poor health is antithetical to the priorities of younger workers, who say they want to work for a company with a purpose.

Here’s progress, and about time too.  This long called for, and long overdue decision has been covered by CNN (6/17), New York Times (6/17), Food Dive (6/17), USA Today (6/18), and Reuters (6/18).

CPG firms review, overhaul black brand mascots:  Following Quaker Oat’s decision to rebrand its Aunt Jemima line, the parent companies of brands Uncle Ben’s, Mrs. Butterworth’s and Cream of Wheat — all of which have black mascots — have plans to change or review the brands’ logos and packaging. “[W]e are committed to evaluating our packaging and will proactively take steps to ensure that we and our brands do not inadvertently contribute to systemic racism,” B&G Foods said about Cream of Wheat’s chef image in a statement.

PepsiCo’s CEO promises a complete overhaul:

So today, I am announcing the next step in PepsiCo’s journey for racial equality: a more than $400 million set of initiatives over five years to lift up Black communities and increase Black representation at PepsiCo. These initiatives make up a holistic effort for PepsiCo to walk the talk of a leading corporation and help address the need for systemic change.

These changes are steps in the right direction.  To make them meaningful, companies must push for a cultural transformation and be willing to openly confront deeply embedded but sometimes unconscious attitudes and behavior.

Let’s hope these promises result in real change.

For some context, take a look at Toni Tipton-Martin’s, The Jemima Code: Two Centuries of African American Cooking, and her article about the retirement of the image in Sunday’s New York Times.

And then there’s this perfect image for food politics (source unknown, alas):

Addition

A reader, who wishes to remain anonymous, writes: “The removal of the Aunt Jemima image reminds me of artist Betye Saar’s 1972 assemblage, “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima.”  I see that Betye Saar has responded: “She’s liberated! Finally at long last!”

The NCD [non-communicable disease] Alliance is a network of more than 2000 organizations in 170 countries.  Its purpose to to raise awareness of NCDs—type 2 diabetes, heart disease, cancer and the like—among international agencies and to develop civil society capacity to prevent these conditions.

It has produced an interactive world map of examples of unhealthy industry responses to Covid-19.

Here’s an example from Jamaica.

This is an easy, one-stop shopping place to find out how food companies are exploiting Covid-19 to market products.

Make a note of it.

I know this is a burning question:

Has coronavirus changed how much alcohol Americans are drinking?  New research looks at what impact stay-at-home orders and conditions during the COVID-19 crisis have had on American alcohol consumption.

The survey, which included 1,000 American adults and was carried out by APCO Insight, showed 35% of Americans are drinking about the same despite stay-at-home orders and 28% are drinking less. This includes 11% who say they have stopped drinking entirely.

Not being able to go out and bars and restaurants being closed are the top two reasons for drinking less, with 38% and 33% of respondents citing these factors respectively.

This last is bad news for the alcohol industry, which expects beverage alcohol to take five years to rebound from the coronavirus.

Total global alcohol consumption, boosted by increases in beer and RTD [ready to drink] products, grew by +0.1% in volume and +3.6% in value in 2019. But the near complete shutdown of bars and restaurants across the world for several months this year has set the category back dramatically.  While there has been an uptick in liquor retail and ecommerce, this has not been enough to offset the losses in the on-trade….this will lead to double-digit declines in 2020, which will take until 2024 to recover to 2019 pre-Covid-19 levels. In the US and UK, this is likely to take even longer.

Will there be fewer auto accidents, less domestic violence, and reductions in other alcohol-related problems?  The data should be coming in soon.

Addition, June 21

Several readers wrote to complain that I did not give enough information about these articles.  In particular, David Jernigan, a professor at Boston University’s School of Public Health, said there is a lot as yet unknown about alcohol consumption right now,

But the source I would not go to is responsibility.org – they are a wholly owned unit of the Distilled Spirits Council of the Untied States (DISCUS), one of the leading alcohol industry trade groups…from the coverage of it in your blog and the link to the story on it in BeverageDaily.com, there are some obvious problems with their findings:

First, it looks like they asked people “do you drink responsibly?” as opposed to objective measures. There are much better ways to measure drinking behavior and I would not expect reliable findings from such a vague question.

Second, even their survey finds that prevalence of drinking has increased – up from 71% in the past month last year to 79% in the past month in the same period this year.

Finally, the article on this in BeverageDaily.com, to the author’s credit, asks and reports on how the survey figures match up with sales figures. The answer is they don’t. Off-premise sales are generally about 75% of sales volume. IRI reports that retail alcohol sales in the US “remain elevated” through 13 May, when they were up 34.2% compared to the same period last year. Only frozen foods have performed comparably. Nielsen figures say the same thing – total alcohol sales up 16% during the overall lockdown period compared with 2019. Spirits has been the biggest winner (up 27.4%), which suggests that people are maximizing purchases for alcohol content.

On-premise sales per outlet are down 68%. If you do the math between the two sectors, this adds up to about an 8.5% increase in sales overall. Add to this that people are most likely buying more for cheaper (more 24-packs of beer and boxed wine, according to Nielsen, in addition to spirits, the category with the highest alcohol content, seeing the largest sustained increase), and it starts to give a more accurate picture than DISCUS’s survey.

We won’t know for sure what has happened until the more accurate public health surveys come back from the field. However, as of early April, 18 of 22 police departments asked by NBC News about domestic violence calls indicated they were up substantially – a canary in the coal mine?

I am grateful to professor Jernigan for taking the trouble to write and even more for providing this information.  The alcohol industry has a long history of manipulating research in its own interests.  It’s always good to remember that this industry’s purpose is to sell as much booze as possible to as many people as it can, while public health efforts are aimed precisely at the opposite.

Populations with the lowest overall intake of alcohol on a population basis, are those that also have low levels of alcohol-induced social problems: car and other accidents, domestic and other violence, and problems with work, intimacy, and mental and physical health.