Simon N. Williams, Marion Nestle(Editors). Big Food: Critical perspectives on the global growth of the food and beverage industry. Routledge, 2016.
Here’s what the publisher says about it:
Obesity is a global public health problem of crucial importance. Obesity rates remain high in high-income countries and are rapidly increasing in low- and middle- income countries. Concurrently, the global consumption of unhealthy products, such as soft drinks and processed foods, continues to rise. The ongoing expansion of multinational food and beverage companies, or ‘Big Food’, is a key factor behind these trends.
This collection provides critical insight into the global expansion of ‘Big Food’, including its incursion into low-and-middle income countries. It examines the changing dynamics of the global food supply, and discusses how low-income countries can alter the ‘Big Food’-diet from the bottom-up. It examines a number of issues related to ‘Big Food’ marketing strategies, including the way in which they advertise to youths and the rural poor. These issues are discussed in terms of their public health implications, and their relation to public health activities, for example ‘soda taxes’, and the promotion of nutritionally-healthier products. This book was originally published as a special issue of Critical Public Health.
When these papers came out in Critical Public Health, I did a post on them. The new hardback book is expensive. To save money, try the journal.
Last summer, Brian Wansink, a friend and Cornell colleague and the editor of the new Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, asked me to write a commentary on a paper to be published in its inaugural issue.
The paper turned out to be by a group of authors, among them John Peters and Jim Hill, both members of the ill-fated Global Energy Balance Network, the subject of an investigation by the New York Times last August.
The healthy defaults reduced calories (21.4%), fat (43.9%) and sodium (43.4%) for kid’s meal sides and beverages sold in the park. These results suggest that healthy defaults can effectively shift food and beverage selection patterns toward healthier options.
The authors explain:
This work was supported by the Walt Disney Company and by the National Institutes of Health…The Walt Disney Company and the National Institutes of Health had no role in the design, analysis, or writing of this article. Full disclosure: JH is a consultant for the Walt Disney Company and for McDonalds; KA is a consultant for the Walt Disney Company.”
I thought Disney’s sponsorship of this research and its withholding of critical baseline and sales data on kids’ meals that the company considered proprietary did indeed deserve comment, and wrote my piece accordingly. Brian Wansink soon accepted it for publication but to my surprise, gave it to Peters et al. for rebuttal. They filed a lengthy response. I was then given the opportunity to respond, and did so, briefly.
The paper by Peters, et al. did was published in the journal’s first issue. This issue also includes several commentaries on other papers (none of which are accompanied by rebuttals).
My commentary—and the back-and-forth—however, were omitted.
After some discussion, the journal published my commentary online. You have to scroll down to find it. The site provides no links to it in the table of contents or in the article by Peters et al.
Is it possible that Disney or the authors’ contractual relationships with Disney could have had anything to do with the omission of my accepted-for-publication commentary? Brian Wansink says no, they just ran out of room (despite room for others).
Whatever.
Here’s what I wrote:
Dietary nudges for obesity prevention: They work, but additional policies are also needed
In 2006, the Walt Disney Company announced a new initiative to improve the nutritional quality of meals served to children at its theme parks. The company would be changing the default kids’ meals—the components that come without having to be ordered separately–to include low-fat milk, juice, or water rather than soft drinks, and sides such as apple sauce or carrots rather than French fries. Parents who wanted sodas or fries for their children would have to ask for them, something many might not bother to do. Health groups had long advocated for this policy change (Wootan 2012).
As I commented to a reporter at the time, “going to Disney World is an excuse for eating junk food…Disney or its advisers must be feeling they have some responsibility” (Horovitz and Petrecca 2006). Indeed, the healthier defaults were part of a larger effort by Disney to deal with its contribution to obesity in America. After ticket prices, food is the second greatest source of revenue at Disney World. Although reducing the amount of food consumed at the parks might help create a less “obesogenic” food environment, revenues might fall. But the default change might be revenue neutral. By 2008, Disney could report that two-thirds of U.S. customers ordering kids’ meals had accepted the default, with no loss in sales. In Hong Kong Disney parks, nearly all customers accepted the default. The report, however, did not include data on the numbers or proportions of customers ordering kids’ meals (Walt Disney Company 2008).
Disney’s more recent summary of its child health initiatives states that it is funding investigators at the University of Colorado to conduct a more formal evaluation of use of the default options (Walt Disney Company 2015). The paper by Peters et al. (2016) in this issue of the Journal presents the results of that research. Their work confirms the ongoing effectiveness of the strategy. Nearly half the customers ordering kids’ meals accepted the healthy default side dishes and two-thirds accepted the healthier beverages. These choices resulted in significant reductions in the calories, fat, and sodium in purchased kids’ meals, but not sugar (Peters et al 2016).
The authors argue that gentle nudges changes like these are preferable to more coercive policies that smack of nanny statism. Such reductions help, but are they enough to make a real difference? To answer this question, it would help to know what else the children were eating along with the drink and side dishes. Although the authors were given raw sales data, Disney did not permit them to use this information as part of the overall analysis. The company also refused to provide information about the number of children who visited the park or the number of kids’ meals sold.
These missing pieces raise red flags because this is a Disney-funded study that produced results that Disney can use to advertise itself as a company that cares about kids’ health, and to deflect attention from Disney World’s’ reputation as a junk-food paradise. Corporate funding of research introduces conflicts of interest and reduces the credibility of the results, not least because the biases inherent in such research are largely unconscious, unintentional, and unrecognized (Moore et al 2005) The results of this study merit especially careful scrutiny. Taking them at face value, the default strategy worked well for the drink, but the sides are still a problem, and so are the sugars. They do not reveal much about what kids eat in a day at Walt Disney World
Nudges like this default are an important part of strategies to counter childhood obesity. But are they enough to deal with the public health problem? To make a real difference, they need to be accompanied and supported by a range of policy approaches. Current thinking about such approaches recommends combining insights from behavioral research, economics, and public health to establish a food environment far more conducive to making the healthy choice not only easy choice, but also the preferred choice. Doing so is likely to require multiple actions—for example, regulation of nutrient content and marketing; incentives such as subsidies of healthier foods; disincentives such as taxes, warning labels, and nutritional rating systems for unhealthier foods; and education of adults and children (Hawkes et al 2015). Disney’s voluntary default is a small step in the direction of such policies, but many more are needed if we are to make real progress in reducing the prevalence of childhood obesity.
Margo G. Wootan. Children’s meals in restaurants: families need more help to make healthy choices. Childhood Obesity 2012;8(1):31-33.
Bruce Horovitz and Laura Petrecca. Disney to make food healthier for kids. USA Today, October 17, 2006.
Walt Disney Company. Walt Disney Company—2008 Corporate Responsibility Report. 2008.
Walt Disney Company. Magic of Healthy Living brochure. 2015. https://thewaltdisneycompany.com/sites/default/files/MOHL_Brochure.pdf.
John C. Peters, Jimikaye Beck, Jan Lande, Zhaoxing Pan, Michelle Cardel, Keith Ayoob, and James Hill. Using healthy defaults in Walt Disney World restaurants to improve nutritional choices. J Assoc Consumer Res., 2016;1:1.
Don A. Moore, Daylian M. Cain, George Loewenstein, and Max H. Bazerman, editors. Conflicts of Interest: Challenges and Solutions in Business, Law, Medicine, and Public Policy. Cambridge University Press, 2005.
Corinna Hawkes, Trenton G Smith, Jo Jewell, Jane Wardle, Ross A Hammond, Sharon Friel, Anne Marie Thow, Juliana Kain. Smart food policies for obesity prevention. The Lancet 2015;385:2410–2421.
And here’s my response to the rebuttal by Peters et al.
The response from Peters and Hill still fails to acknowledge the severity of the problems posed by Disney’s sponsorship of their research—the company’s failure to produce data essential for proper interpretation of study results, and the level to which sponsorship by food companies biases such interpretations. At one point, Disney boasted of the results of this research, confirming its benefit to marketing goals. The threat of industry sponsorship to research credibility has received considerable press attention in recent months, as must surely be known to these authors.1,2
Yesterday, members of Mexico’s Nutritional Health Alliance held a press conference to complain that a Coca-Cola Christmas television ad violated the human rights of the indigenous people of the Mixe community of Totontepec.
The ad, released by Coca-Cola in late November on social media as part of its “OpenYourHeart” Christmas advertising campaign shows young people who are outsiders to the Mixe indigenous community arriving to build a Christmas tree of wood and Coca-Cola bottle caps, distributing Coca-Cola to young people from the community and transmitting the message “Stay United” in the Mixe language.
Coca-Cola removed the ad from its social media channels, but you can watch a version produced by the Alliance in which Mixe youth comment on the ad. The Alliance also has produced a translation.
On November 6, the New York Times reported that the University of Colorado was returning a million dollar grant that had paid for the Global Energy Balance Network (GEBN), the group funded by Coca-Cola that said you didn’t need to worry about what you ate as long as you were active.
On November 24, AP reporter Candice Choi published e-mails between the U. Colorado scientist behind the GEBN. These revealed that “Coke helped pick the group’s leaders, edited its mission statement and suggested articles and videos for its website.”
On November 29, Helena Bottemiller Evich wrote in Politico how health advocates are running endless campaigns for so taxes, and that these will soon be coming to a polling place near you.
On December 1, the GEBN closed shop as a result of loss of funding.
This week’s issue of The Lancet Diabetes and Endocrinology contains an opinion piece by U North Carolina professor Barry Popkin and Corinna Hawkes of City University London arguing that the world is eating too much sugar and that changes in policy are needed to encourage reduced consumption of sugary drinks. According to Politico Morning Agriculture, the American Beverage Association (ABA) is most unhappy about the piece. It claims that the prevalence of obesity and diabetes are rising but soft drink sales are falling in the U.S., saying “This proves that beverages are not driving these epidemics.” [Comment: as I discuss in Soda Politics, only half the population drinks sugary beverages meaning that those who do drink them drink a lot. Also, diabetes rates are falling in the U.S.]
The ABA won a battle in San Francisco, but is surely losing the public relations war. It sued the city over a Board of Supervisors ban on ads for sugary drinks on city property and requiring warning labels on all billboards and other surfaces within the city. The ABA argued that both laws violate the First Amendment. You might think this argument would get thrown out of court immediately, but you would be wrong, as the Supreme Court is becoming more hostile to such laws. If you want to hear how the Board of Supervisors reacted to this, click here for the meeting transcript. (thanks to Politico Morning Agriculture for this item too and to Michele Simon for clarifying the legal issues).
I keep getting asked “why pick on sodas?” The answer: they are an easy target, low-hanging fruit in public health terms. They contain sugars but nothing else of redeeming nutritional value, are strongly associated with diets that raise the risk of obesity and its consequences, and are heavily marketed as what you need to be happy. The industry is fighting hard and on many fronts to maintain sales. Advocates are keeping its lawyers and lobbyists busy.
All this was just in the last month. Expect more to come.
Use and enjoy the list of media resources—links to videos, audios, songs, movies, infographics, commercials—keyed to illustrate the text.
This book:
Answers the question, how did what is essentially flavored sugar-water come to mean so much and to have such devastating health and food policy consequences?
Is the first to focus on the history, politics, nutrition, and health of soda, integrating public health science with historical and cultural research
Helps readers understand how we created this food system, what its problems are, and what we can do to fix these problems
Is illustrated with 70 figures and 50 tables
Comes with a Foreword by Mark Bittman, food journalist and columnist for The New York Times
Comes with an Afterword by Dr. Neal Baer, pediatrician and television writer and producer
Here are the book’s blurbs:
“The soda industry is a powerful economic operator. Economic power readily translates into political power. Soda Politics is exactly the kind of carefully-researched investigative reporting needed to open the eyes of the public and parliamentarians to the health hazards of what is, as the author rightly notes, essentially liquid candy in a bottle.” –Dr. Margaret Chan, Director-General, World Health Organization
“No book in history has so completely laid bare the soda scourge that touches every corner of the world. Marion Nestle shows how this happened, its impact on human health and well-being, who the players are, and, most importantly, what might be done. This is the right book at the right time.” –Dr. Kelly Brownell, Dean, Sanford School of Public Policy, Duke University
“Marion Nestle is one of the greatest muckrakers of our time, and what she does is vitally important-for our health, our environment, and for future generations. Here, she wages war against the soda titans with such piercing clarity and so many irrefutable truths that all other arguments crumble.” –Alice Waters, Founder and Proprietor of Chez Panisse
“Comprehensive and well-written, this book will help frame a thoughtful public policy debate about nutrition and the societal impacts and costs of obesity.” –Ann M. Veneman, Former US Secretary of Agriculture and Former Executive Director of UNICEF
“What happens when the food industry’s most insightful critic turns her sights on soda? This razor-sharp, fun to read, plan-of-battle for one of the greatest public health fights of our time. Big soda may have all the money, but those who would enter this fray, as we all should, now have their champion.” –Michael Moss, Author of Salt Sugar Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us
“For decades, soda companies have amassed fortunes off drinks that are making us sick. It took someone like Marion Nestle to cut through the spin and uncover the high cost of cheap sodas.” –Robert Kenner, Director/Producer, Food Inc. and Merchants of Doubt
“Long recognized as an important and informed voice in our national and international discussions on nutrition and health, Marion Nestle has written another book that will keep us talking. With an impressive combination of scholarship and advocacy, Dr Nestle takes an unflinching look at the soda industry, its products and the impact on health. Soda Politics deserves the attention of the public and policy makers, and should make us all think more carefully about choices we can make to improve health and well-being.”–Margaret Hamburg, M.D., Former Commissioner, U.S. Food and Drug Administration
REVIEWS
Here’s the first review from the August 2015 Library Journal:
Nestle (nutrition, New York Univ.) once again exposes the dark side of the food business. As in her 2007 Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, the author examines the soft drink industry, demonstrating how products that are basically flavored water with added sugar contribute to obesity, type-2 diabetes, and metabolic syndrome. She discusses the composition and production of soda, the adverse effects of excess sugar consumption, and product marketing. The companies’ targeting of children, low-income, and minority communities; lobbying of Congress to prevent legislation that would impact profits; funding of research to produce results that obscure the facts about soda; and donations to health organizations and charities in order to be portrayed as socially responsible corporations make it difficult for citizens to act. Nestle reveals what can be done and how to do it, providing relevant data, analyzing that information, and illustrating its difficulties. She then advocates for smaller portions, taxing sugary drinks, and excluding soda from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and provides examples of successful campaigns, a list of groups advocating for healthy beverage choices, and extensive notes. VERDICT An outstanding manual for health educators, activists, and anyone seeking information about the soda industry and its impact on health.— Barbara Bibel, formerly Oakland P.L.
For me, the single most stunning and appalling revelation comes in the section about environmental impact and industry responses to it. It is that between 340 and 620 litres of water are used for every litre of soft drink produced, about 20% of that related to packaging. Despite such disturbing revelations,Soda Politics is not discouraging…Throughout the book, Nestle provides tactics for practical, local advocacy, such as working with school wellness committees and engaging local policymakers. And since 2002, the proportion of US citizens who say that they avoid soft drinks has risen by 20%, reaching nearly two-thirds of the population…For public health to prevail over soda politics as usual, we have miles to go. This book is the richly drawn map of how to get there, from here.
The standard operating practices of companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo demand the same level of scrutiny as cigarette companies, and for many of the same reasons, argues Marion Nestle in the introduction of her new book, Soda Politics. What follows is a thorough and unflinching look at the soft-drink industry’s role in promoting the consumption of sugary drinks despite growing evidence that they are detrimental to our health. The book begins with a basic primer of the range of health problems that have been linked to soda consumption, from tooth decay to obesity and diabetes, hitting its stride with an eviscerating assessment of the industry’s marketing and advocacy practices.
For those readers who share Nestle’s critical perspective on the food industry, it is obvious that this book would be informative. But here is the greater surprise: this solid book is by far the best source on this topic for any reader, with any perspective on economics or politics. If I worked for a trade association, or an industry front group, or an esteemed professional association that relies on soda industry funding, or the House Agriculture Committee, or a sugar manufacturer, or a high-powered corporate law firm, I might store this book in my desk drawer rather than my book shelf … yet I would read it word for word.
In Soda Politics (OUP, £19.90), Dr Marion Nestle does us all a great service by spelling out clearly and authoritatively the dreadful price we are paying for guzzling gallons of sugared water – Coke and Pepsi by any other name. Big Soda, as Dr Nestle calls the billion-dollar corporate giants behind this poison, know exactly how bad their products are for us but are so powerful no one takes them on. Rise up and rebel, Nestlé urges.
Nestle writes like an investigator hunting every possible scrap of damning material for a prosecutorial brief, which will no doubt make her book an excellent resource for activists and reformers seeking remedies in Washington, in the courts, and, perhaps, in the aisles of the local supermarket.
Fortunately, so does Marion Nestle. The nutrition professor, advocate and investigator best known for “Food Politics” profiles the soft drink industry in her expansive, superbly researched new book, “Soda Politics: Taking On Big Soda (and Winning).” It isn’t so much a narrative as a well-organized barrage of facts, some eye-popping (the world’s soda companies produce nearly two trillion 12-ounce servings annually), others banally incriminating. They come off the page like jabs in a sustained pummeling lasting more than 400 pages. Even if Nestle is only half right, it’s still a total knockout.
Nestle is foremost an educator and an activist, and Soda Politics is worth its price alone for the chapters on advocacy, from recruiting public health leaders and working from within to protecting public water resources…In other words, we can change things, one Big Gulp at a time.
Sabnavis M. Bitter fizz. Financial Express (India), March 20, 2016: A book that exposes that there’s more ill in a cola bottle than mere sugar—environment costs, high water use and pure politics.
Here is the online version of my commentary in New Scientist, March 14, 2015:24-25.
I submitted an illustration with it, which the editors did not use. It’s from the Ontario Medical Association.
Cigarettes get plain packets – will junk food be next?
The tobacco industry is fighting moves to sell cigarettes in plain packs by claiming food manufacturers will be hit next. Will they?
ANTI-SMOKING advocates will be delighted. MPs have today voted in favour of introducing uniform packaging for cigarettes in the UK. That plain wrappers will undoubtedly further reduce smoking, especially among young people, is best confirmed by the tobacco industry’s vast opposition to this government measure and positive evidence from Australia, the first country to adopt it.
Along with lobbying and appeals to the World Trade Organization, the tobacco industry, when under attack, inevitably wheels out well-worn arguments about the nanny state, personal freedom, lack of scientific substantiation, and losses in jobs and tax revenues.
So to perk up its tired and thoroughly discredited campaign, the tobacco folks have added a new argument. Requiring plain wrappers on cigarettes, they say, is a slippery slope: next will be alcohol, sugary drinks and fast food. This argument immediately raises questions. Is it serious or just a red herring? Should the public health community lobby for plain wrappers to promote healthier food choices, or just dismiss it as another tobacco industry scare tactic?
Let me state from the outset that foods cannot be subject to the same level of regulatory intervention as cigarettes. The public health objective for tobacco is to end its use. So for cigarettes the rationale for plain wrappers is well established. Company logos, attractive images, descriptive statements, package colours and key words all promote purchases. Plain wrappers discourage buying, especially along with other measures such as bans on advertising, smoke-free policies, taxes and health warnings.
Australia’s pioneering law specified precise details of pack design, warning images and statements. The result: cigarette brands all look much alike. Most reports say plain packaging boosts negative perceptions of cigarettes among smokers and increases their desire to quit. Australia expects plain packaging to further reduce its smoking rate, which, at 12.8 per cent, is already among the world’s lowest. Along with the UK, New Zealand and Ireland are well on the way to adding plain packaging to their anti-smoking arsenal. More nations are considering it.
Which is all bad news for the tobacco industry. So it ramps up the slippery slope argument, hoping the food industry will support its fight against plain wrappers. It cites examples such as the regulation of infant formula in South Africa, where pictures of babies on labels are forbidden; that’s a big problem for the Gerber food brand – Gerber’s company logo is a smiling baby.
But those peddling the slippery slope idea ignore the fact that the health message for tobacco is simple: stop smoking. But beyond tobacco, it is more complex. For alcohol it is a little more nuanced: drink moderately, if at all. For food it is much more nuanced. Food is not optional; we must eat to live. Nutritional quality varies widely. Foods are spread across a spectrum from unhealthy to healthy, from soft drinks (no nutrients) to carrots or fish (many nutrients). Most fall somewhere in between. What’s more, an occasional soft drink is fine; daily guzzling is not. So the advice is to choose the healthy and avoid or eat less junk, both in the context of calorie intake and expenditure.
Is there any evidence that plain packaging for unhealthy foods would reduce demand? Research has focused on marketing’s effect on children’s food preferences, demands and consumption. Brands and packages sell foods and drinks, and even very young children recognise and desire popular brands. When researchers compare the responses of children to the same foods wrapped in plain paper or in wrappers with company logos, bright colours or cartoon characters, kids invariably prefer the more exciting packaging.
But the problem is deciding which foods and beverages might call for plain wrappers. For anything but soft drinks and confectionery, the decisions look too vexing. Rather than having to deal with such difficulties, health advocates prefer to focus on interventions that are easier to justify – scientifically and politically.
We know that some regulations and market interventions –analogous to, if not the same as those aimed at smoking cessation – are essential for reducing the damage from harmful products. If not plain packaging, then what? Studies suggest small benefits from a long list of interventions such as taxes, caps on portion size, front-of-package traffic-light labels, nutrition standards for school meals, advertising restrictions, and elimination of toys from fast food meals and cartoons from packaging. Rather than dealing with the impossible politics of plain wrappers on foods, health advocates increasingly favour warning labels.
These first appeared on cigarette packs in the 1960s and have been considered for food products since the early 1990s. Heart disease researchers suggested that foods high in calories and fat should display labels such as: “The fat content of this food may contribute to heart disease.” More recently, health advocates in California and New York proposed warning labels on sugary drinks. The Ontario Medical Association takes a similar view: “To stop the obesity crisis, governments must apply the lessons learned from successful anti-tobacco campaigns.” It has mocked up examples of warnings on foods.
Although no warning label law has passed so far, such messages are the logical next step in promoting healthy food choices, in the same way that plain wrappers are the next logical step for all cigarette packages. Health advocates should recognise the slippery slope argument for the typical tobacco ploy that it is.
Agreeing to decrease soda consumption by 20 percent is easy to do when demand is already falling rapidly
–Marion Nestle, September 30, 2014
The recent pledge by Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and the Dr Pepper Snapple Group to reduce calories that Americans consumd from their products by 20 percent by 2025 elicited torrents of praise from the Global Clinton Initiative, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and the national press.The real news: soda companies are at last admitting their role in obesity.Nevertheless, the announcement caused many of us in the public health advocacy community to roll our eyes. Once again, soda companies are making promises that are likely to be fulfilled anyway, whether the companies take any action or not.
Americans have gotten the word. Sodas in anything but small amounts are not good for health.
Although Coca-Cola and the American Beverage Association have funded studies that invariably find sodas innocent of health effects, the vast preponderance of research sponsored by the government or foundations clearly demonstrates otherwise.
Think of sodas as candy in liquid form. They contain astonishing amounts of sugars. A 12-ounce soda contains 10 (!) teaspoons of sugar and provides about 150 calories.
It should surprise no one that adults and children who habitually consume sugary drinks are far more likely to take in fewer nutrients, to weigh more, and to exhibit metabolic abnormalities compared to those who abstain or drink only small amounts.
And, contrary to expectation, diet sodas don’t seem to help. A widely publicized recent study suggests that artificially sweetened drinks affect intestinal bacteria in ways, as yet undetermined, that lead to metabolic abnormalities–glucose intolerance and insulin resistance. This research is largely animal-based, preliminary, and requires confirmation. But one thing about diet drinks is clear: they do not do much good in preventing obesity.
People who drink diet sodas tend to be more obese than those who do not. The use of artificial sweeteners in the United States has gone up precisely in parallel with the rise in prevalence of obesity. Is this a cause or an effect? We don’t know yet.
While scientists are trying to sort all this out, large segments of the public have gotten the message: stay away from sodas of any kind.
Since the late 1990s, U.S. per capita consumption of soft drinks has dropped by about 20 percent. If current trends continue, the soda industry should have no trouble meeting its promise of another 20 percent reduction by 2025.
Americans want healthier drinks and are switching to bottled water, sports drinks, and vitamin-fortified drinks—although not nearly at replacement levels. The soda industry has to find ways to sell more products. It also has to find ways to head off regulation. Hence: the promises.
To deal with sales shortfalls, the leading soft-drink brands, Coca-Cola and Pepsi, have expanded their marketing overseas. They have committed to invest billions to make and promote their products in Latin America as well as in the hugely populated countries of Asia and Africa where soda consumption is still very low.
From a public health standpoint, people everywhere would be healthier—perhaps a lot healthier—drinking less soda.
In California, the cities of San Francisco and Berkeley have placed soda tax initiatives on the November ballot. The American Beverage Association, the trade association for Coke, Pepsi, and the like, is funding anti-tax campaigns that involve not only television advertising and home mailings, but also creation of ostensibly grassroots (“astroturf”) community organizations, petition campaigns, and, when all else fails, lawsuits to make sure the initiative fails. These efforts are carbon copies of the tactics used to defeat New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s portion size cap proposal.
If the soda industry really wants to help prevent obesity, it needs to change its current practices. It should stop fighting tax and size initiatives, stop opposing warning labels on sugary drinks, stop lobbying against restrictions on sodas in schools, stop using sports and music celebrities to sell products to children, stop targeting marketing to African-American and Hispanic young people, and stop funding research studies designed to give sodas a clean bill of health.
And it should stop complaining, as PepsiCo’s CEO Indra Nooyi didlast week, that nobody is giving the industry credit for all the good it is doing.
If the government really were serious about obesity prevention, it could ban vending machines from schools, set limits on the size of soft drinks sold at school events, define the amount of sugars allowable in foods and beverages, and, most of all, stop soda marketing aimed at children of any age.
Because neither the soda industry nor the government is likely to do any of this, public health advocates still have plenty of work to do.
Marion Nestle is professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University. She is currently working on a book titled Soda! From Food Advocacy to Public Health.
The Alliance for a Healthier Generation (founded by the American Heart Association and the Clinton Foundation) and the American Beverage Association (funded mainly by Coca-Cola and PepsiCo) jointly announced this week that the major soft drink companies were pledging to reduce beverage calories consumed per person nationally by 20% by 2025.
The Alliance, Coca-Cola, Dr Pepper Snapple, PepsiCo, and the American Beverage Association placed a full-page ad in yesterday’s New York Times:
This is a tremendous undertaking by the industry, one that should be applauded, and also one that will not come easily. The industry will leverage every ounce of their national and local influence, product innovation and marketing muscle to reach this ambitious and necessary goal. And when this goal is reached, we believe it will not only signal a shift in access to reduced-calorie options, but also a positive shift in consumer interest in these no-and lower-calorie options.
This is huge…I’ve heard it could mean a couple of pounds of weight lost each year in some cases…in low-income communities, sugary sodas may account for a half or more of the calories a child consumes each day.
In a statement, Risa Lavizzo-Mourey, president and CEO of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said:
We congratulate the Alliance for a Healthier Generation and the beverage industry for continued action towards reducing the beverage calories consumed by people across the United States. We are especially pleased that this commitment will target communities with disproportionately high consumption rates of sugar-sweetened beverages. We look forward to working with the Alliance and beverage industry to measure and monitor the impact of this commitment on the health of our country.
Despite the congratulations, I can’t take this as anything more than public relations.
Soda sales are going to decline by that much anyway.
Although the Alliance says the companies will do this through national initiatives to educate consumers about smaller portions, lower-calorie beverages, and water, and to focus these efforts in lower income communities, they really don’t have to do a thing.
All they have to do is wait for these trends to continue. The Times quotes me on this point:
While they’re making this pledge, they are totally dug in, fighting soda tax initiatives in places like Berkeley and San Francisco that have exactly the same goal,” said Professor Nestle, who has just finished a book about the industry.
Here’s what I mean:
The American Beverage Association and soda companies are putting millions into fighting soda tax initiatives in San Francisco and Berkeley.
could accelerate progress by dropping its opposition to taxes and warning labels on sugar drinks. Those taxes could further reduce calories in America’s beverage mix even more quickly, and would raise needed revenue for the prevention and treatment of soda-related diseases.
And, CSPI says, the soda industry should stop opposing and, instead, should support Representative Rosa DeLauro’s Sugar-Sweetened Beverage Tax Act of 2014 (the SWEET Act), which aims to tax caloric sweeteners. This would raise $10 billion a year to help prevent and treat diseases caused by excess soda consumption.
But the CEO of Pepsi says the soda industry isn’t getting enough appreciation for its efforts to counter obesity.
Politico ProAg‘s Helena Bottemiller Evich reports that at a meeting sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) to applaud the soda industry’s announcement, Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo’s CEO,
expressed frustration with the endless criticism from activists who blame much of the obesity epidemic on the food industry despite what she sees as significant progress from the biggest brands in America…“Why not give industry a compliment and then talk about the next step?…We have now stemmed the growth in calorie consumption, which is huge…I look at those trends and think industry has done pretty well, as a whole.
Why the RWJF, a major funder of initiatives to counter obesity, seems so cozy with Pepsi is curious.
The coziness is especially curious because of Mrs. Nooyi’s “We.” If the industry is “doing well,” it’s because health advocates, some of them funded by RWJF, have forced soda companies to change their practices.
The one significant accomplishment: an admission that sodas contribute to obesity
The move is an implicit acknowledgment by the soda industry that longtime staples like Coke, Pepsi-Cola and Dr Pepper have played a role in rising obesity rates.
Good for CVS! Cigarettes are in a class by themselves. The evidence that links cigarette smoking to lung cancer and other serious health problems is overwhelming, unambiguous and incontrovertible. So is the evidence that the mere presence of cigarettes is sufficient to create demand, especially among young people.
When the anti-cigarette smoking movement began, the issues were simple: stop people from starting to smoke and get people who smoked to stop — by making it difficult, uncomfortable and expensive for smokers to continue their habit. The ultimate goal? Put cigarette companies out of business. This, of course, has been politically impossible, not least because cigarette companies pay such high taxes.
If CVS wants to promote health, it could increase sales of healthy snacks, and stop selling sugary foods and drinks.
Although there are many parallels in company marketing practices, food is not tobacco. For all tobacco products, the response is simple: stop. Food is more complicated. We must eat to survive. A great number of foods meet nutritional needs. The evidence that links a particular food product to health is often uncertain. This is because each food is only one component of a diet that contains many foods in a lifestyle that might involve other factors that affect health: activity, alcohol, drugs, stress and let’s not forget genetics.
With that said, if CVS really wants to promote health, it could consider increasing its sales of fruits, vegetables and healthy snacks, and stop selling sodas, ice cream, chips and other junk foods. Those foods may not have the same bad effect on health as tobacco, but eating too much of them on a regular basis is associated with weight gain, obesity and the conditions for which obesity is a risk factor, like Type 2 diabetes and heart disease. If CVS wants to counter obesity, dropping soft drinks is a good place to start. They have scads of sugars, and kids who drink them regularly take in more calories, are fatter and have worse diets than kids who do not.
