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McDonald’s sent out a press release yesterday to announce “healthier” changes to its Happy Meals.

Healthier?  Not quite.  The company is announcing a “Commitment to Offer Improved Nutrition Choices” [my emphasis].

The comprehensive plan aims to help customers — especially families and children — make nutrition-minded choices whether visiting McDonald’s or eating elsewhere.

Menu changes underway include the addition of more nutritionally-balanced choices that meet McDonald’s reputation for great taste and affordability, along with an increased focus on providing nutrition information that enable customers and employees to make simple, informed menu decisions.

McDonald’s says that by the end of this year it will automatically include produce or a low-fat dairy option in every Happy Meal.  It will:

• Automatically include both produce (apple slices, a quarter cup or half serving)
• Automatically include a new smaller size French fries (1.1 ounces)
• Automatically reduce the sodium by 15% or more

I emphasize “automatically” because it means the default. If you order a Happy Meal, that’s what you get.   Research shows that most people stick with the default. If the default is a healthy meal, kids have a better chance of getting one.

Everything else is your choice:

• Hamburger, Cheeseburger or Chicken McNuggets.
• “Beverage, including new fat-free chocolate milk and 1% low fat white milk”

The press release says: “McDonald’s will automatically include produce or a low-fat dairy option in every Happy Meal.”

Doesn’t that sound like the Happy Meal will come with low-fat milk?

Wrong.

The meal comes with a choice of a soda or low-fat chocolate or white milk.  Soda remains an option.  And the meal still comes with a toy.

So all the fuss—and McDonald’s has gotten huge press over this—is about 3 or 4 small slices of apples, one ounce less of French fries, and less sodium.

The New York Times’ summary:

These may be steps in the right direction, but I’d call them tiny baby steps.

So what’s going on here? Much of this is about responding to Michelle Obama’s call for action on childhood obesity.

But according to the Wall Street Journal, business matters may also be at stake. Happy Meals account for less than 10% of McDonald’s U.S. sales, but sales have been declining since 2003 for a funny reason: “gadgets for children have become more sophisticated and the toys less desirable.”  Of course the only reason kids want Happy Meals is for the toys.

But kids have to eat.  Instead of Happy Meals, parents have been

ordering adult-size items off the ‘dollar menu’ and splitting them between two children rather than buying two kids’ meals.

Kids’ meal orders at fast-food restaurants have declined 15% since 2006 to just under a billion, while dollar-menu items ordered by or for kids have increased 29% in the last five years.

The Wall Street Journal quotes a restaurant consultant who comments that

Making [apples] a forced decision is a pretty unusual thing for a restaurant to do…If they can get to a place where parents associate them with healthy offerings in a world of increasing fast casual options that are perceived as healthier, that will be good for them.

But will it? McDonald’s tested healthier meals with disappointing results.  So this has to be about McDonald’s trying to appear to do something to promote kids’ health. In reality, it can’t. McDonald’s is a business and its business interests come first.

If McDonald’s were serious, it could offer a truly healthier Happy Meal as the default and back it up with marketing dollars.  When the company does that, I’ll cheer.  Until then, as I told the Times, “I’m not impressed.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The second quarter financial results are in and food companies are doing great, thanks to sales in developing countries. For example:

McDonald’s: Meatandpoultry.com reports (July 22) a 15% increase in income “boosted by strong sales throughout the world.”  Total revenue for the quarter was $6.9 billion, up 16% from $5.9 billion during the same quarter last year.

PepsiCo: Food Navigator reports an increase in net income to $1.88 billion up 18% from $1.6 billion last year. Despite “challenging conditions in the North American beverage market”… worldwide beverage and snacks businesses accounted for growth along with the acquisition of Russian dairy and juice company Wimm-Bill-Dann.  Sales in emerging markets increased 4% in beverages and 9% in snacks:  “We continue to enjoy robust top-line growth in key emerging markets,” said PepsiCo chairman and CEO Indra Nooyi.

Coca-Cola: Although its North American sales were sluggish, sales increased “due to growth in emerging markets such as China, Russia and Mexico.”  Income rose 18% to $2.8 billion from $2.4 billion last year.  Sales rose 6% in Latin America, 5% in Europe, 7% in Eurasia and Africa, and 7 in the Pacific region.   Growth in China ws 24%, in Russia 17%, and in Mexico 7%.  In contrast, North American volume recorded a growth of a measly 1%.

Americans are turning away from these products.  We already have plenty of obesity.  Now it’s time to export it.

A reader, Jeff Harpell, comments on my scheduled talk in Barcelona:

I lived in Barcelona last year and the year before….While they are becoming more influenced by American fast food, having both parents work, and buying more from one stop food markets, the lifestyle, social support systems, i.e., healthcare and eating habits still are very different from the USA

….I suspect that the Catalonians are concerned about their citizens’ heading down a path of bad eating habits and how to prevent them. Any thoughts to share?

Three first impressions:

1.  The tourist bureau on La Rambla gives out a free city map courtesy of McDonald’s.  The map helpfully identifies the location of all of the McDonald’s outlets in Barcelona, and its such a relief to know that you don’t have to go far to find one.  I counted at least 10.

2.  The Carrefour supermarket has a meat section unlike any supermarket meat section in the United States. Those unwrapped hams are not cheap (yes, that’s 79 Euros, nearly $140, but it’s a big ham).  Leaving the ham attached to the hoof is an interesting touch.  I can only imagine what the New York City health inspectors might say about them.

3.  The Boqueria open-air food market has the most beautiful cut fruit for sale—something like this would make getting those daily fruit servings a real treat.

More to come!

When San Francisco voted to eliminate toys from McDonald’s Happy Meals, the Forum at the Harvard School of Public Health invited comments on this issue.  Here’s what I had to say about it:

I’m surprised at the mayor’s comment that “parents, not politicians, should decide what their children eat,” because the San Francisco ordinance is not about the food. It’s about the toys.

Nobody is stopping parents from ordering Happy Meals for their kids. But as everyone knows, kids only want Happy Meals because of the toys.

The idea that government has no role in food choice is ludicrous. The government is intimately involved in food choices through policies that make the cost of some foods—those containing subsidized corn or soybeans, for example—cheaper than others.

It is not an accident that five dollars at McDonald’s will buy you five hamburgers or only one salad. It is not an accident that the indexed price of fruits and vegetables has increased by 40% since the early 1980s, whereas the indexed price of sodas has decreased by 30%. Right now, agricultural policies support our present industrialized food system and strongly discourage innovation and consumption of relatively unprocessed foods.

Agricultural policies are the results of political decisions that can be changed by political will. If we want agricultural policies aligned with health policies—and I certainly do—we need to exercise our democratic rights as citizens and push for changes that are healthier for people and the planet.

Yes, individuals are the ultimate arbiters of food choice.

But our present food system makes unhealthful eating the default. We need to be working for government policies that make healthy eating the default. The San Francisco ordinance is a small step in that direction.

The Pop-Tarts store in Times Square (see yesterday’s post) is only the loudest example of innovative food marketing to come out recently.  I’ve been collecting more subtle examples:

Using social media (and getting customers to pay for it): For 99 cents to I-tunes, you can buy an app that gives nutritional information for products at Jack-in-the-Box or at McDonald’s.   As Mark Douglas of Culinate explains: “They want $0.99 to tell you what you probably already know… Watch Out!”

Co-opting health professionals: Michele Simon (author of Appetite for Profit) writes on AlterNet about how PepsiCo hires distinguished health professionals and experts to give a company that sells snack foods and soft drinks an aura of health and wellness.

Co-opting professional organizations: Lisa Young (the Portion Teller) points me to a Webinar on August 25 run by the industry-sponsored School Nutrition Foundation and the Milk Processor Education Program on what is surely an urgent issue for sellers of chocolate (sugar-added) milk: “Keep flavored milk from dropping out of school!”

Deflecting attention from diet: Lisa sends another Webinar notice for September 14, this one for “skills & tools to enhance change in physical activity behavior.”  Its sponsor?

The Coca-Cola Company’s Beverage Institute For Health & Wellness is a Continuing Professional Education (CPE) Accredited Provider with the Commission on Dietetic Registration (CDR) – provider number BF001.

Plain, old-fashioned lobbying: Food Safety News has a nifty report on food company lobbying expenditures (huge), mainly on the food safety bill but also on many other bills that might affect labeling or sales of food products.

I reviewed these methods in my book, Food Politics. A revised edition came out in 2007.  Not much change, alas.

Addition: Attracting school kids: Michele Simon sends this Pepsi partnership with Hy-Vee stores in Iowa.  Parents buy five Pepsi products; Pepsi buys backpacks for their kids.

Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) has written a letter to McDonald’s threatening to sue if the company refuses to remove the toys from its Happy Meals.

This comes at a time of rapidly accumulating evidence for the effectiveness of toys, cartoons, and the like in encouraging even very young children to pester their parents for products, to prefer such products and to believe that branded products taste better.

Here is the press release announcing this action.  And here is CSPI director Michael Jacobson’s statement about it.

McDonald’s has 30 days to respond.  Can’t wait to see what it says.

Corporate Accountability International, the modern incarnation of Infact and the Nestlé (no relation) boycott,  has just launched the Retire Ronald campaign as part of its Value [the] Meal initiative.

The campaign is based on a new report, Clowning With Kids’ Health.   The report makes it clear that Ronald is ubiquitous anyplace where children might be – on the Internet, and in schools, kids’ libraries, and kids’ hospitals.

If you, like others, think it’s time to see Ronald retired and out of the marketing-to-kids business, join the campaign and sign Ronald’s retirement card.

Read the press release.  Visit the website, www.RetireRonald.org.

Here is how Corporate Accountability International explains its mission:

For more than 30 years Corporate Accountability International (formerly Infact) has run hard-hitting and highly effective campaigns to save lives, protect public health, and preserve the environment.  Value [the] Meal is a campaign led by Corporate Accountability International dedicated to reversing the global epidemic of diet-related disease by challenging McDonald’s and the fast food industry to curb the range of its practices that are contributing to the epidemic.of its practices that are contributing to the epidemic.

Thanks to Dr. Yoni Freedhoff for keeping me current on Canadian food politics. His latest post is about the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation’s new program to heart-check fast food meals.  The Foundation hasn’t officially announced the program yet, although you can  find it buried in an obscure questionnaire on its website.  Pizza Hut also mentions its participation in the program on its website.   [Update February 3: Pizza Hut has now announced its participation in the program]

The program is coming soon and here’s Dr. Freedhoff’s political cartoon of what it is likely to look like .  No, this isn’t real.  Dr. Freedhoff’s point is that it could be.

What, you might ask, are the criteria for the heart check?  Let’s just try sodium: 720 mg per serving.   Even the late and not lamented Smart Choices program did better than that (480 mg per serving).

You think Dr. Freedhoff is exaggerating and this is improbable?  Alas, not so.  In Australia a couple of years ago, I took this snapshot at a McDonald’s on the Adelaide beach.

The check marks come from the Heart-Tick program of the National Heart Foundation of Australia.  So Canada is just now catching up.  Canadian readers: can’t you do something about this?  And American Heart Association: clean up your act too!

Addendum: Thanks to Lisa Sutherland for pointing out that what gets heart-checked in Canada is comparatively low in U.S. terms.  She sends McDonald’s nutrition information as proof.   Practically everything is higher in sodium than 720 mg.  When it comes to sodium, everything is relative, I guess, but all of it is way high.