In a University of Oxford Press (UOP) blog post titled “From cigarettes to obesity, public health at risk,” University of Florida Psychiatry Professor Mark Gold advances his food addiction hypothesis and suggests, “If overeating is due to food acquiring drug-like or tobacco-like brain reinforcement properties, then the current globesity and overeating-related health crisis might have lessons to learn from tobacco.” Gold recently co-edited a book of essays, Food and Addiction, and claims that taxes on soft drinks, like taxes on cigarettes, could reduce consumption. According to Gold, animal tests show “that sucrose and fructose corn syrup are self-administered as if they were drugs and that an opiate-like abstinence syndrome could be produced by detoxification or antagonist administration.” He claims that new treatments based on the addiction hypothesis should address food preferences “and not just appetite.” He concludes, “New approaches, evidence-based approaches, like those that have been used successfully to develop…
Category Archives Media Coverage
A recent article in The New York Times has highlighted the efforts of Fast Food Forward, a campaign seeking to unionize fast-food workers in New York City. According to Times labor and workplace reporter Steven Greenhouse, the campaign has worked with 40 full-time organizers with the support of community and civil rights groups to recruit employees at fast-food restaurants across the city and coordinate a walkout in protest of low wages “and retaliation against several workers who have backed the unionization campaign.” In particular, Greenhouse notes the many challenges facing the nascent initiative, which has not yet decided on an overall strategy or mechanism for pursuing unionization. Labor experts and companies also emphasized that the high turnover in most fast-food positions makes organization difficult. “It’s a fairly high-turnover position, so there’s never been a successful union effort,” said one spokesperson for Domino’s Pizza. “People who are doing this part time,…
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has released a study claiming that on any given day, adult consumers of alcoholic beverages imbibe approximately 16 percent of their total caloric intake from alcoholic beverages— “the same contribution to overall calories as the 16 [percent] from added sugars among U.S. children.” Samara Joy Nielsen, et al., “Calories Consumed from Alcoholic Beverages by U.S. Adults, 2007-2010,” NCHS Data Brief, November 2012. According to the study, which used data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, the adult population consumes on average “almost 100 calories per day from alcoholic beverages.” Divided between the sexes, however, the data reportedly showed that men drank 150 calories worth of alcoholic beverages each day whereas women consumed “a little over” 50 calories. “We’ve been focusing on sugar-sweetened beverages. This is something new,” said CDC epidemiologist and study co-author Cynthia Ogden. In particular, the study noted…
New York University Nutrition Professor Marion Nestle recently gave an interview to Childhood Obesity’s features editor, Jamie Devereaux, on healthy food access, the role of packaged foods in diets, and “the topic of peer pressure in eating fast food, sugar-sweetened beverages, and brand-name snacks.” While supporting federal policy to increase fresh fruit and vegetable consumption in low-access areas, Nestle noted barriers to cooking at home such as a lack of proper equipment and a narrow food selection exacerbated by income inequality. But she also blamed industry for allegedly fostering peer pressure among young consumers to choose certain foods and beverages above others. “Food marketers deliberately target children and adolescents for marketing, much of it designed to associate the product to the emotional gains from peer bonding,” Nestle opined. “The purpose of food advertising is to make kids think they are supposed to be eating kids’ food—food made just for them—and that they know…
According to a November 5, 2012, New York Times article, technology and media companies have joined trade groups and marketing associations in opposing the Federal Trade Commission’s (FTC’s) efforts to update provisions implemented under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). As regulators look to expand the types of data-collection activities covered by COPPA, companies such as Facebook, Google and Twitter have reportedly pushed back against these proposals as unduly onerous and likely to stifle all web-based services created for children. Industry analysts have purportedly noted that once FTC requires parental consent for companies to use customer code numbers to track children, the agency “might someday require… similar consent for a practice that represents the backbone of digital marketing and advertising—using such code numbers to track the online activities of adults.” Furthermore, social media platforms have apparently taken issue with a plan to hold third parties liable “if they know…
In a move that Mother Jones magazine calls “surreal,” The Corn Refiners Association (CRA) has issued a press release using the magazine’s recently published exposé “Big Sugar’s Sweet Lies” as a “cudgel” in CRA’s battle with the sugar industry. The exposé outlines the alleged decades-long efforts by the U.S. sugar industry to influence the debate about the health effects of sugar compared to high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS), and CRA apparently believes it helps its case. In the article “Are High-Fructose Corn Syrup Makers in Denial?,”Mother Jones author Michael Mechanic writes, “The corn refiners should be sending flowers, not subpoenas, to the Sugar Association. After all, the association’s decades-long campaign to bury evidence suggesting that its product plays a role in the ‘death-dealing diseases’—as revealed in our story—has benefited the makers of HFCS as well. If the corn refiners imagine that our exposé somehow left them looking good, well, I’ve got some…
“If even the ad industry can’t agree on the definition of an online ad, who can?,” asks The Washington Post’s Cecilia Kang in this November 2 article highlighting the “increasingly thorny debate on how to monitor advertising aimed at children when they are confronted with so many new forms of marketing online.” Kang reports that both the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Federal Communications Commission regulate traditional media but have thus far failed to restrict online advertising to kids, leading consumer groups to question the supposedly “lax oversight of digital marketing.” “There is a great deal of research that shows children don’t distinguish between content and advertising,” American University Communications Professor Kathryn Montgomery was quoted as saying. “Now on digital, there is the opportunity of more blurring of those lines, and the industry is pushing to keep definitions of online advertising broad and unclear.” In particular, Kang notes that even…
In a recent article detailing the safety risks faced by underage farm workers, New York Times journalist John Broder examines thwarted efforts to broaden farm labor regulations after reports of silo, bin and grain elevator fatalities at both large commercial enterprises and smaller family operations not currently covered by federal law. “Experts say the continuing rate of silo deaths is due in part to the huge amount of corn being produced and stored in the United States to meet the global demand for food, feed and, increasingly, ethanol-based fuel,” writes Broder. “That the deaths persist reveals continuing flaws in the enforcement of worker safety laws and weaknesses in rules meant to protect the youngest farm workers. Nearly 20 percent of all serious grain bin accidents involve workers under the age of 20.” In particular, the article describes agricultural child labor rules proposed by the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) that not…
“[T]he theory that the brain responds to high-fat, high-calorie foods similarly to how it responds to drugs is now gaining scientific muscle, led by renowned names in the field of addiction,” reports The Daily Beast’s Laura Beil in an October 28, 2012, article describing so-called food addiction as “one of the hottest topics in obesity research.” In particular, Beil recounts the work undertaken by former tobacco researchers such as Mark Gold, who now chairs the University of Florida’s Department of Psychiatry, as well as animal studies that examine how brain chemicals respond to “highly palatable” foods. The article also explains human brain scans that have led scientists to focus attention on dopamine receptors, which “can reveal a great deal about the dynamics of pleasure, reward motivation, and addiction,” and hormones such as ghrelin that help regulate the desire to eat. Although Beil notes that experts have cited data inconsistencies in…
Following publication of an article titled “Sweet Little Lies,” Mother Jones magazine has made available online the documents underlying the authors’ assertions of sugar-industry influence over government dietary policy and scientific health effects research. Additional details about the article appear in Issue 459 of this Update. Among the documents is one from 1942 that purportedly “encouraged sugar cane and sugar beet producers to create a joint research foundation to counter the ‘ignorance’ the industry was facing.” It discusses World War II sugar rationing and campaigns “derogatory to sugar.” A video featuring one of the article’s authors is also available online. In a related development, writing in the Harvard College Global Health Review, Dylan Neel calls for strict regulation of sugar, including taxation, reduced availability, control of the location and density of retail markets, and tightened vending machine and snack bar licensing. He claims in his October 24, 2012, article “The…
