by Tom Laskawy.
Michelle
Obama’s anti-obesity initiative, Let’s Move, has kicked into high gear. The Presidential
Task Force on Childhood Obesity released
a landmark report documenting the scale of the problem, complete with a list
of 70 recommendations and a set of benchmarks, including the goal of returning
the childhood obesity rate to its 1972 level of 5% by 2030. And
this week came the announcement that a new industry partnership called the
Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation, which includes most of the major food
companies, agreed to reduce the number of calories in its members’ products by 1.5 trillion calories by 2015.
It
would be churlish of me to downplay the significance of either the report or
the industry announcement. As nutritionist Marion Nestle observed,
whatever skepticism one may rightly have regarding industry self-regulation,
the fact that the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation—whose public health
credentials in general and anti-obesity efforts in particular are beyond
reproach—will be auditing the calorie-cutting plan should keep industry shenanigans
to a minimum.
But
what will a 1.5-trillion calorie cut look like? In an article that
helpfully explains how companies might go about reaching their goal—lower-calorie Lunchables! Smaller Kraft Cheese slices!—former food industry
executive Hank Cardello puts
the cuts into context:
…[T]his
is a drop in the bucket and represents only a 0.5 percent reduction in the 300
trillion calories available for Americans to consume each year. That translates
to less than 1.5 pounds of added weight per person. Hardly enough to resolve an
obesity crisis.
That context
was left of out of the comments by David Mackay, chair of the Healthy Weight Commitment
Foundation, at the White House announcement. But he
did express his deep pleasure that the concept of “calories in/calories
out” is a foundational concept of the White House childhood obesity initiative.
“Calories in/calories out” refers to the idea that balancing consumption with exercise
is the key to maintaining a healthy weight. It also happens to be the industry
mantra, since it mostly leaves industry off the hook. It becomes an individual’s
responsibility to count calories and get enough exercise. Industry can offer a
helping hand with programs like this one, but on the whole can be left to its
own devices.
And
certainly, industry desperate wants to be left along. As Kelly Brownell, head
of the Yale Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity said
to the Washington Post‘s Jane Black: “My
guess is that they were going to do this anyway… The hidden motive here is to
convince government to back off and not regulate the industry.”
The
question then becomes if these impressive-sounding but small-bore industry
initiatives will make up for an apparent lack of political will from the Obama
administration to force government to do its part. The Task Force report is
full of things the government should do, but has only a handful of things it will do.
Meanwhile,
one of the core commitments the Obama administration has made to address obesity—through the reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act, aka the National School Lunch Program—is stuck in congressional limbo. The bill, already disappointing
in its minimal increases in funding, appears stalled at least until after
the 2010 midterm elections.
Indeed,
I’d feel better about the administration’s supposed laser-like focus on the
National School Lunch Program—already overdue for reauthorization and operating under
an extension of the current version, with all its flaws—if it showed a
little more engagement with the current congressional bottleneck. I suspect,
however, that with the coming of the political season surrounding the midterm
elections, even a public health crisis on the scale of the obesity epidemic
must take a back seat to more pressing concerns.
In
essence, the task force’s report—with its laundry list of recommendations and benchmarks,
most of which don’t start until 2015 and don’t end until 2030—feels less like
the roadmap its reputed to be and more like a poorly written recipe. The
ingredients are excellent, and there’s a beautiful picture of what the final
dish will look like, but the step-by-step instructions are missing. We don’t
know the order or even the precise amounts of each ingredient. We do know
there’s a great dish in there somewhere, but we don’t know how to make it.
Now,
it’s clearly unreasonable to expect the task force to have created a precise recipe to fix a social problem on this scale. But of the dozen or so recommendations that were identified as
the government’s responsibilities, which will the Obama administration enact? Where
was the call from the President for all federal agencies mentioned in the
report to draw up a specific action plan in response to the recommendations?
We’re
just not going to meet these benchmarks without government policy playing a
significant role. Industry needs to be a partner, of course. But we are after all talking about the
industry that gave us the
now infamous Smart Choices label,
with guidelines so slack that even Froot Loops could qualify. The same industry that tried to pass
off sugar-sweetened
Cocoa Krispies as immune boosting. The same industry that had the CEO of
one of its most powerful companies refer
to soda as a “staple food.” And the same industry that targets
children with billions of dollars in advertising so that it can take advantage
of the “nag factor” at the supermarket. It is, in short, not to be
trusted.
Along
those lines, I was not encouraged by a recent interview
in Politico with Melody Barnes, the administration’s director of the Domestic Policy
Council, and chief architect of Let’s Move. When Mike Allen asked
what the government itself was going to do to address obesity in the wake of
the task force’s report, Barnes gave a lengthy description of the
administration’s efforts on the school lunch program and its Healthy Food Financing
Initiative, which would fund grocery stores in so-called “food deserts.” Both predate the task force report. When Allen pressed on the
subject, Barnes offered no other initiatives.
We
have learned over the last decade and to our great chagrin that a change in
administration can undo decades of good government. The more that Let’s Move relies on industry good
behavior and bully pulpit exhortations from the White House as it tries to
avoid writing policies into law that might change the underlying structural
foundation of the obesity epidemic, the more likely we are to risk falling back
to old patterns once our enthusiasm flags or—dare I say it—a Republican
returns to the White House, which could happen well before the final obesity
benchmark in 2030.
Drops
in the bucket, even dozens of them, just won’t get the job done.
Cross-posted from markbittman.com.
Related Links:
DC rejects soda tax but funds better school food
Endocrine disruptors really do suck
Lessons from Berkeley schools: The truth about kids and vegetables
