Based on hundreds of internal industry documents, this article outlines the alleged decades-long effort by sugar-producing interests to influence the scientific debate about the purported health effects of sugar. According to the authors, the memos, letters and company board reports “show how Big Sugar used Big Tobacco-style tactics to ensure that government agencies would dismiss troubling health claims against their products.” The article claims that the industries’ goals were the same: “safeguard sales by creating a body of evidence companies could deploy to counter any unfavorable research.” As early as 1943, grower and refiners reportedly formed the Sugar Research Foundation to counter calls for sugar-rationing during World War II. Among other matters, the article claims that the industry purportedly spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on research suggesting that low-calorie sweeteners caused disease in animals and redirected any research funds it was providing through its International Sugar Research Foundation (ISRF)…
Category Archives Media Coverage
“Are you a food addict?,” asks a September 20, 2012, New York Times “Well” blog post featuring a “food addiction” quiz . Citing several food studies allegedly suggesting “that food and drug addiction have much in common, particularly in the way that both disrupt the parts of the brain involved in pleasure and self-control,” columnist Tara Parker-Pope offers a shortened version of the Yale Food Addiction Scale created by researchers at Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity. The quiz asks readers to respond to such questions such as, “I find myself consuming certain foods even though I am no longer hungry” and “I keep consuming the same types or amounts of food despite significant emotional and/or physical problems related to my eating.” Based on the inputted responses, the applet then provides a food addiction score ranging from “not addicted” to “possible food addiction” indicating that “you may…
Employment law practitioners are, according to a recent article, predicting an increase in the number of obesity-related claims filed against employers under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The 2008 amendments have made it easier for employees to prevail in these cases, and a trio of claims filed and resolved in recent months demonstrates that the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and courts are recognizing obesity as a disability in itself, rather than focusing on some underlying physiological condition as the basis for the employees’ disability. Settlements of obesity claims in Texas and Louisiana have resulted in payments of $55,000 and $125,000, respectively, while the Montana Supreme Court determined that a physiological disorder underlying morbid obesity is not necessary for a disability claim under a state law that mirrors the ADA. See The National Law Journal, September 24, 2012.
“U.S. food companies are reaching children by embedding their products in simple and enticing games for touch-screen phones and tablets,” writes The Wall Street Journal’s Anton Troianovski in this September 18, 2012, article examining how food and beverage manufacturers allegedly use mobile games and phone apps to sidestep “government and public pressure to limit advertising to minors on TV and the Web.” According to Troianovski, some of these companies have argued that food-branded apps are a cost-effective marketing tool that would not violate any advertising restrictions because parents much purchase the games first. “We don’t view it as our place to be a superparent—the nanny of the parents or the children to say what products that can see and what games they can play,” Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative Director Elaine Kolish told the Journal. Troianovski notes, however, that the proliferation of such apps has raised questions among consumer…
“In an era of political polarization, Michael Bloomberg has the rare ability to come up with policies that enrage everyone,” opines New Yorker staff writer James Surowiecki in this August 13, 2012, article analyzing the mayor’s plan to prohibit all New York City food vendors from selling sodas in sizes larger than 16 ounces. Surowiecki argues that despite bipartisan disdain for the proposal, Bloomberg’s scheme “makes clever use of what economists call ‘default bias,’” the tendency for consumers to choose certain options not because they reflect actual needs or desires but because they are presented as the default selection within the context of other choices. As Surowiecki recounts, researchers have allegedly shown that people calibrate their consumption habits by outside cues “like the size of a package or a cup” as opposed to feelings of satiety. “And since the nineteen-seventies the portion sizes offered by food companies and restaurants have…
“The fact is, organic food has become a wildly lucrative business for Big Food and a premium-price-means-premium-profit section of the grocery store,” writes Times correspondent Stephanie Strom in this July 7, 2012, article about perceived conflicts of interest on the National Organic Standards Board (NOSB). According to Strom, who tracks the consolidation of organic brands under larger corporations, “[t]he industry’s image—contented cows grazing on the green hills of family-owned farms—is mostly pure fantasy. Or rather, pure marketing. Big Food, it turns out, has spawned what might be called Big Organic.” Strom argues that Big Organic has “come to dominate” the 15-member NOSB, which determines the national list of nonorganic ingredients permitted in “certified organic” products. In particular, she claims that some seats reserved for farmers or scientific experts have gone to corporate executives or other representatives from large organic food processors with a stake in promoting their own production methods.…
The director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity recently authored an article in The Atlantic arguing in favor of the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s (DOHMH) proposal to limit the size of sugar-sweetened beverages (SSBs) sold in restaurants and other food service establishments. According to Kelly Brownell, industry opposition to the measure is rooted in concern over profits, which “increase as people buy bigger portions” since “the cost for the soda companies and restaurants to serve larger sizes may be mere cents for a larger cup and the extra liquid.” As a result, he says, soda manufacturers have banded together to voice their opposition to the measure, a campaign that Brownell anticipates will include lawsuits as well as “new industry-funded studies that will show, contrary to the large number of existing studies, that portion size does not have an effect on eating or…
“There are no longer any viable reasons to maintain outdated nutrition labeling standards for sugar,” opines Jennifer Pomeranz, director of legal initiatives at Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, in this article urging the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to revise sugar labeling regulations to better inform and protect consumers. Citing recent developments such as recommendations by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the American Heart Association to limit sugar consumption, “new and robust” science suggesting high-sugar intake is detrimental to human health, and the Institute of Medicine’s call for front-of-packaging labeling for sugar, Pomeranz maintains that FDA’s reluctance to require manufacturers to disclose sugar and added sugar is based on old science and obsolete concerns. “The need for more information relevant to sugar on food labels is long overdue,” she writes. “The government can currently require more information pertinent to total sugar consistent with the public…
Asking “Wouldn’t it be better, as a general rule, if judges who meet regularly with prosecutors in advance of a cascade of high-profile indictments didn’t hear the cases that follow?,” Slate court-watcher Emily Bazelon recently discussed the petition for certiorari currently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court in the case of the kosher meatpacking facility manager convicted of bank fraud and sentenced to 27 years, essentially a life term for the 50-year-old defendant from Iowa. Rubashkin v. United States, No. 11-1203 (petition for cert. filed April 2, 2012). Mostly on procedural grounds, a federal appeals court rejected the defendant’s claims that the judge should have recused herself because she participated extensively with prosecutors in activities that led to an immigration raid on the facility, the detention and deportation of hundreds of workers, and charges of harboring illegal immigrants, child labor law violations and bank fraud. Bazelon suggests that the Court…
“The new wave of American cuisine has a regressive side, wrapped up in nostalgia for an imagined past… To chefs like [Daniel Patterson], unprocessed milk does not just taste better; it is sentimental and, more important, it is pure,” claims New Yorker staff writer Dana Goodyear in this article chronicling the raw milk movement and its ongoing confrontation with government regulators. Focusing on a California-based group known as “the Rawesome Three” who in 2011 were arrested for—among other charges—running an unlicensed milk plant and processing milk without pasteurization, Goodyear likens the covert world of raw milk to that of marijuana and other illicit substances. Despite the insistence of food safety officials that unpasteurized milk “can carry salmonella, campylobacter, and E. coli O157:H7,” the raw milk acolytes quoted in Goodyear’s report apparently believe in the product’s natural healing properties and will go to great lengths to obtain it, frequenting undercover specialty stores…
