“Whether it’s the food industry, tobacco, or alcohol, they all use the same talking points and lobbying strategies,” opines the Marin Institute’s Michele Simon in this April 2010 article that likens “Big Soda” to the alcohol lobby. Simon draws on her experience as a research and policy director to claim that soft drinks are more analogous to alcohol than tobacco, noting that “the message is more about cutting down.” She thus offers six “lessons” for taking on industry in the fight over soft drink taxation. In particular, Simon advises consumer advocates to resist assertions that (i) “soda doesn’t cause obesity or that taxes won’t work”; (ii) “a penny per ounce tax will cause massive job loss”; and (iii) companies “care about poor people and working families.” She provides several strategies for refuting what she describes as industry misrepresentation and manipulation of data on these points. For example, she maintains that…
Category Archives Media Coverage
Bolivian President Evo Morales attracted international media attention when he publicly linked “deviances in being men” on hormones once used to raise chickens. Speaking at the World People’s Summit on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth, Morales reportedly claimed that “the chicken we eat is loaded with female hormones. So, when men eat those chickens, they experience deviances in being men.” According to an April 22, 2010, blog post in The Guardian, Morales added that these substances have also been associated with baldness. After the speech drew widespread criticism from both the press and human rights activists, who interpreted the remark as homophobic, the Bolivian Foreign Relations Ministry issued a statement defending the president’s position. “He made no mention of sexuality,” the ministry was quoted as saying. Rather, he said that eating chicken that has hormones changes our own bodies. This point of view has been confirmed by…
“If we are to solve the many problems that obesity is creating for American society, we must first move beyond the stale ‘willpower versus the food-industrial complex’ debate,” contends politics editor Marc Ambinder in the May 2010 edition of The Atlantic. Examining the powerful interest groups arrayed against each other in this fight, Ambinder claims that the rise in obesity is not attributable to one specific cause but “is associated with a rogue’s gallery of individual, social, and technological factors.” He resists the temptation “to borrow insights and metaphors from the 50-year battle against smoking,” maintaining that “[o]besity belongs in a different category of social illness.” In Ambinder’s view, the current epidemic is a confluence of both personal and environmental risks largely mitigated by socioeconomic status. In particular, he criticizes public health campaigns aimed at individual choices when “just being an American can naturally lead you to be obese.” According to…
The Chronicle of Higher Education recently profiled Kelly Brownell, director of Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity, and his decades-long advocacy of soft drink taxes, an idea that once attracted derision but today “doesn’t seem so radical.” The Chronicle notes “growing evidence of a link between price and consumption,” citing recent reports that appear to lend credence to Brownell’s crusade. Despite opposition from free market economists, the beverage industry and groups like the Center for Consumer Freedom, the proposal has purportedly gained traction in legislative circles, rippling outwards from cities and states to the upper echelons of federal government. Counted among these supporters is Thomas Frieden, who once co-authored a paper with Brownell and now directs the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Moreover, according to The Chronicle, “[t]he professor is aware that the renewed interest in his idea is, at least in part, prompted by the budget…
The Independent has reported on an escalating dispute in the scientific community over the safety of bisphenol A (BPA), tracing the brouhaha to a three-year study commissioned by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) that found no evidence of BPA adversely affecting laboratory rats exposed to high doses of the ubiquitous plasticizer. In an April 13, 2010, article, science editor Steve Connor observes that Toxicological Sciences, which published the original work online in 2009, has become the battleground of choice for scientists arguing the merits of the research. Additional details about the EPA study appear in issue 327 of this Update. According to The Independent, University of Missouri-Columbia Professor Frederick vom Saal first attacked the results in a letter to the journal, claiming that EPA researchers “violated U.S. National Toxicology Program recommendations” by failing to establish “the sensitivity of the animal model to the class of chemical being tested.” This allegation,…
AlterNet recently interviewed musician Moby on the publication of his new book, Gristle: From Factory Farms to Food Safety (Thinking Twice About the Meat We Eat), edited with food policy activist Miyun Park. According to the March 31, 2010, interview, the vegan manifesto is “a medley of anti-industrial meat memes written by an eclectic mix of advocates, experts and others who offer 10 compelling reasons for eliminating factory-farmed animal products from our diet.” The popular DJ touted his tome as “more factual and informative than most other animal-oriented books,” decrying what he described as the deliberate deception of agribusiness firms, “which maintain a PR ethos of egregious obfuscation.” Dismissing claims that Gristle contributes to a spate of “glitzy celebrity propaganda campaigns,” Moby pointedly declined to quibble with the term “conscientious carnivore” and conceded that “[a] carnivore who eats local chickens and is loving and nice to everyone around him is probably…
“If there’s a nutrient it’s easy to overdose on, it’s folic acid,” writes Prevention columnist Laura Beil in this article citing research allegedly linking the synthetic form of B vitamin folate to colon, lung and prostate cancers. Beil reports that this nutrient is already a staple in most diets, partly because the government requires its inclusion in enriched grains such as white flour and white rice to reduce birth defects. Still, according to Beil, many food manufacturers have taken it further, “giving breakfast cereals, nutrition bars, and beverages a folic acid boost.” Noting that women are advised to get 400 micrograms (mcg) of folic acid daily, she registers concern that some consumers who take a multivitamin and eat breakfast are getting “a megadose before walking out the door.” Beil focuses on studies that have purportedly linked these high folic acid doses to an increase in hospitalization rates for colon cancer.…
The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA’s) Bee Research Laboratory has released the preliminary results of a survey estimating that honeybee colony losses nationwide “were approximately 29 percent from all causes from September 2008 to April 2009,” touching off speculation about the fate of the ubiquitous pollinator. Federal investigators reported that only 15 percent of all colonies lost during the 2008/09 winter apparently died of colony collapse disorder (CCD), leading USDA to emphasize “the urgent need for research” on general honeybee health. “It’s just gotten so much worse in the past four years,” USDA Research Leader Jeff Pettis was quoted as saying. “We’re just not keeping bees alive that long.” According to media sources, apiary experts have blamed the honeybee die-off on a combination of viruses, bacteria and pesticide residues. In particular, beekeepers have cited a March 19, 2010, study published in PLoS One that reportedly identified at least one systemic pesticide…
“Goats were the first animals raised for food that were domesticated by humans 9,000 years ago,” writes Participant Media researcher Sarah Newman in this article examining the impact of goats on the world’s food supply. “Currently, two-thirds of all red meat eaten worldwide is goat meat,” common fare for a few billion people currently inhabiting or with roots in Africa, the Middle East and South America, she notes. According to Newman, culinary interest in goat dishes in the United States is on the rise by consumers who “are responding well” to the taste or nutrition benefits of goat meat and dairy products. Dairy goat industry sources assert that goat’s milk contains more calcium and vitamin B6 and vitamin A than cow’s milk, and is lower in calories and more digestible for those prone to lactose intolerance. But the challenge to farmers is keeping up with the demand. “As more chefs…
This article invokes public-health campaigns of the past, including measures taken to increase seat belt use and stop drunk driving, to call for “big-think solutions” to the nation’s obesity problems. The author outlines the factors that have led to a tripling of obesity rates among teenagers, such as a decrease in physical activity; ubiquitous high-calorie, low-nutrient foods; “rampant” food advertising to children; and food “deserts” in urban areas where the nearest convenience store sells candy and white bread. She quotes Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity head Kelly Brownell as saying, “The country defaults to giving industry the benefit of the doubt. Industry says you don’t need to regulate us; we’ll police ourselves. The tobacco industry abused that with God knows how many lives as a consequence. To expect the food industry to be different may be wishful thinking.” Among the measures the author recommends to address the…
