"The Food Industry Wants the Public Confused About Nutrition"
About 5 years ago, Denmark introduced the world's first tax on saturated fat.
After only 15 months, however, the fat tax was abolished,
due to massive pressure from farming and food company interests.
Public health advocates are weak
when it comes to tackling the issues of corporate power.
One well-used approach for alcohol, tobacco, and now more food-related
corporate interests "is to shift the focus away from health.
This involves reframing a fat or soft drinks tax as an issue of consumer rights
and a debate over the role of the [nanny] state in restricting people's choices."
"The "nanny state" is [typically used as a pejorative term] to discourage
governments from introducing legislation or regulation that might undermine
the power or actions of industry or individuals,"
and has been regularly used to undermine public health efforts.
But those complaining about the governmental manipulation
of people's choices tend to hypocritically be
fine with corporations doing the same thing.
One could argue that public health is being undermined by "Nanny Industry"
that "uses fear of government regulation to maintain its own dominance"
and profits, and at significant cost to public health.
The tobacco industry offers the classic example,
touting personal responsibility, which has a certain philosophical appeal.
Look, as long as people understand the risks,
they should be free to do whatever they want with their bodies.
Now some argue risk taking affects others,
but if you have the right to put your own life at risk,
shouldn't you have the right to aggrieve your parents, widow your spouse,
orphan your children?
Then there's the social cost argument.
People's bad decisions can cost the society as a whole,
whose tax dollars may have to care for them, clean up the mess, right?
"The independent, individualist [motorcyclist],
helmetless and free on the open road,
becomes the most dependent of individuals in the spinal injury ward."
But for the sake of argument,
let's forget these spillover effects, the so-called externalities.
If someone understands the hazards,
shouldn't they be able to do whatever they want?
Well, first of all, this assumes that people "can access
accurate and balanced information relevant to their decisions,"
but "deliberate industry interference has often created situations
where consumers have access only to incomplete and inaccurate information."
"For decades, tobacco companies successfully suppressed or undermined
scientific evidence of smoking's dangers
and down played the public health concerns."
Don't worry your little head, said the nanny company.
Decades of deception and manipulation, deliberate targeting of children,
marketing and selling their lethal products with zeal
and without regard for the unfolding human tragedy.
So "the tobacco industry's deliberate strategy of challenging scientific evidence
undermines smokers' ability to understand the harm[s] smoking poses,"
and so undermines the whole concept that smoking is a fully informed choice.
"Tobacco companies have denied smokers truthful information,"
yet at the same time hold smokers responsible
"for incurring diseases that will cause half of them to die prematurely."
So "in contexts such as these, government intervention
[may be] vital to protect consumers from predatory industries."
And is the food industry any different?
"The public is bombarded with information and it is hard to tell which is true,
which is false, and which is merely exaggerated.
Foods are sold without clarity about the nutritional content or harmful effects."
Remember how the food industry spent a billion dollars
making sure the easy-to-understand traffic light labeling system on food
never saw the light of day and was replaced by indecipherable this?
That's 10 times more than the drug industry spends on lobbying in the US.
It's in the food industry's interest to have the public confused about nutrition.
How confused are we about nutrition?
Head Start teachers are responsible for providing nutrition education
to over a million low-income children every year.
A hundred and eighty-one Head Start teachers were put to the test.
And only 4 out of 181 answered
at least four of the five nutrition knowledge questions correctly.
Most, for example, could not correctly answer the question,
"Which has more calories: protein, carbohydrate, or fat?"
Not a single one could answer all five nutrition questions correctly.
While they valued nutrition education,
54% agreed that it was hard to know which nutrition information to believe,
and the food industry wants to keep it that way.
A quarter of the teachers didn't consume any fruits or vegetables the previous day,
though half did have French fries and a soda,
and a quarter consumed fried meat the day before.
Not surprisingly, 55% of the teachers were not just overweight but obese.
So, when even the teachers are confused something must be done.
No purveyor of unhealthy products wants the public to know the truth.
"An [incredible] example comes from the US 'Fairness Doctrine'
and the tobacco advertising experience of the 1960s.
Before tobacco advertising was banned from television
a court ruling in 1967 required that tobacco companies funded one health ad
about smoking for every four tobacco TV advertisements" they put on.
"Rather than face this corrective advertising,
the tobacco industry took their own advertising off television."
They knew they couldn't compete with the truth.
Just "the threat of corrective advertising, even on a one-to-four basis,
was sufficient to make the tobacco companies withdraw their own advertising."
They needed to keep the public in the dark.