Food Activist Focuses on Industry’s Use of Experts to Win PR Wars
Food activist, author and lawyer Michele Simon writes on AlterNet about how PepsiCo has placed a number of respected, and previously anti-industry, scientific experts on its payroll to the dismay of activists like Marion Nestle and others concerned about the purported influence of corporate resources on the public debate over health, obesity and nutrition. She reports that former “public health hero” Derek Yach established his reputation by working on the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control while working at the World Health Organization and later found himself “at odds with Big Food.” He worked for some time with Kelly Brownell’s team at the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University, but then joined PepsiCo in 2007.
Nestle reportedly described on her “Food Politics” blog a conversation she had with Yach after learning he was working for the food industry after which she “remained unconvinced that his role at PepsiCo was anything more than a well-orchestrated PR move to position the company as being on the cutting edge of health and nutrition.” Simon also discusses Dr. Mehmood Kahn, Dr. George Mensah and the dozen other physicians and Ph.D.s PepsiCo has recently hired, ostensibly “to create healthy options while making the bad stuff less bad.” She quotes Yach as saying, “While we are not likely to become a fresh fruit and vegetable company, we have made public commitments to increase the use of fruits, vegetables, nuts and whole grains in our products. A major challenge involves ensuring that we do so in ways that maximize the full nutritional equivalence of whole foods in our future products.”
Simon comments in response, “Full nutritional equivalence? I don’t recall seeing that in the U.S. dietary recommendations: ‘Eat foods with full nutritional equivalence.’ But what else can you aspire to when your food products don’t fit into any actual food groups?” She further observes that PepsiCo’s CEO was allowed to make a statement in this year’s edition of the F as in Fat report on obesity in America, produced by Trust for America’s Health. A trust spokesperson apparently explained that the CEO’s comments were sought as “an innocent attempt to have the ‘industry perspective’ and not the result of any shady financial relationship.”
Others reportedly did not see the incident this way. The executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy reportedly said it was part of “disturbing trend,” where public health organizations seem to have a growing interest in appearing “unbiased” when discussing obesity prevention by providing a forum to industry. Simon concludes, “no matter how many MDs or PhDs the company hires, PepsiCo should never be looked to as an expert on anything other than what it does best: marketing and selling highly processed food and beverage products to the world.” See AlterNet.org, August 5, 2010.
