The Los Angeles Times ran an interesting article recently that highlights the challenges facing schools and parents as they work to improve the quality of food in schools. Perhaps most importantly, the piece expresses a growing understanding that school lunch programs must improve the quality of their service if they want to keep their customers.
The Rudd Center has consistently opposed marketing junk food to children. I’d like to call our readers’ attention to a recent open letter from a physician and movie fan to George Lucas and Steven Spielberg published by Salon.com.
The letter’s author, Dr. Rahul K. Parikh, notes that he has long been a fan of Star Wars and Indiana Jones, and as a child appreciated the marketing tie-ins to fast food and candy. Today, as a pediatrician who frequently treats overweight children, Dr. Parikh calls on the film directors to cease promotion of junk food in their movies, citing Disney’s termination of their contract with McDonald’s as a model of good behavior.
Forbes magazine recently released a list of the 20 cities with the highest per capita junk food consumption. The magazine used data from Nielsen ScanTrack to analyze per capita junk food sales in 52 markets in the U.S., finding that Oklahoma City had the highest consumption of junk food products, followed by Pittsburgh, Memphis, Little Rock and St. Louis. Most of the cities on the list are in the Midwest or the South, which the magazine notes coincides with higher regional rates of obesity.
A number of speakers at the Rudd Center, including Richard Jackson, MD, have commented that public health advocates need to leverage interest in policies that would reduce global warming to build support for policies related to obesity and diet-related diseases. This past week, I was watching the news and saw a feature on a woman who decided to take the train to work instead of driving because of the high cost of gasoline. As a result of all of the walking needed to get around using public transit, she had lost a great deal of weight and no longer needed to take medication for hypertension. It seemed from the news story that the health effect of walking was a complete (and very welcome) surprise to the woman.
Amid widespread criticism, McDonald’s has ended its report card marketing campaign in Seminole County, FL and will no longer brand report card jackets with images of Ronald McDonald. However, local franchises will continue to reward children with happy meals based on their performance in school.
As noted in this blog in December, this promotion sponsored by local franchise owners may not have been in line with the company’s corporate policies regarding advertising to children. This week, the New York Times reported that McDonald’s USA had previously agreed to curb advertising to children in school, suggesting that this promotion appears to violate the company’s stated policy.
Continue reading "McDonald's Ends Report Card Sponsorship" »
The New York Times recently reported that McDonald’s franchises in Seminole County, FL, have teamed up with the local school district to offer students a “report card incentive” program that rewards good grades, citizenship or attendance with a Happy Meal. While the program raises concerns about the overarching practice of marketing to children and marketing in schools, I am more worried about how it explicitly links performance and self-esteem with eating fast food.
In a past entry on this blog, I had written about the use of "food stamp challenges" to highlight the nutritional impact of living on a very low food budget. I am in general ambivalent about these challenges, but do feel that they provide insight into the many monetary and non-monetary constraints on healthy eating.
As part of a research project evaluating the food environments of Connecticut high schools, we conducted focus groups with current students. Beyond the general complaints about food quality in the school system, what struck me the most were reports about meal timing and the quantity of cereal consumption.
According to a recent Gallup Poll, 83 percent of Americans believe that being obese is “very harmful” to one’s health, similar to the 79 percent who say that cigarette smoking is “very harmful.” More interesting, 74 percent of those in the national poll are sympathetic towards those who are obese because they “understand that it is difficult for them to lose weight even if they want to.”
In mid-June, a U.S. House Agriculture subcommittee unanimously voted to continue the current system of farm subsidies, rejecting reform proposals intended to limit large payments to individual farmers and reduce specific types of farm subsidies that are angering trading partners around the world. While many have argued that commodity subsidies negatively impact public health by reducing the price of corn products and meat, the inability to limit subsidies may also jeopardize changes intended to directly improve food security and child nutrition programs.
One of the biggest public health successes of the 20th century has been the dramatic reduction in death from heart disease. A recent study published in the New England Journal of Medicine used a statistical model to evaluate what led to the 50% reduction in the death rate from 1980 to 2000. Because of changes in risk factors and improvements in treatment, 341,745 fewer Americans died from heart disease in 2000.
Continue reading "Heart Disease Study Adds Perspective to Obesity Prevention" »
When it comes to food, the ideology of personal responsibility remains strikingly seductive. Consider this: food stamp recipients eat fewer fruits and vegetables than the rest of the U.S population (which is not exactly eating a balanced diet either). One way to increase fruit and vegetable consumption in this group would be to subsidize these foods at a higher rate or providing additional money only for fruits and vegetables.
Continue reading "Maybe They’re Just Not Trying Hard Enough" »
After years working at the computer all day, I have argued tongue-in-cheek to friends that office computers should be linked to a recumbent bicycle. Office workers would need to pedal at a slow-to-moderate pace for the computer to function. You would not have to go to the gym after work and could handle the inevitable plate of conference room cookies. While this has not come to pass, the clever folks at Fisher Price are marketing a stationary bicycle/computer learning game for preschool children called Smart Cycle.
Farm bill, farm bill, farm bill . . . everybody’s talking about the farm bill. Well, they probably aren’t, but maybe they should be. In a recent article in The New York Times, Michael Pollan writes about the impact of the US farm bill’s subsidy program on domestic and international commodity food consumption. Cheap corn, as many who follow obesity issues have heard by now, leads to all kinds of unhealthy concoctions, from high fructose corn syrup to abundant and high-fat meat.
One of my closest friends is a firefighter. I remember his mother telling me that she was afraid that he was going to get himself killed in a fire. I assured her that he was too nimble to get caught in a burning building, and that anyway, very few firefighters actually die on duty. What I did not know at the time was that coronary heart disease accounts for 45% of firefighter deaths on duty. Given what I’ve heard about the job, maybe he should be more worried about the firehouse food than falling ceilings.
Americans really don’t like to eat their veggies. According to a
recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)
based on a national survey of more than 300,000 U.S. adults, slightly
more than 1 in 4 is eating the recommended 3 or more servings of
vegetables a day. The news is a bit better for fruit: 1 in 3 adults
report eating 2 or more servings of fruit a day.
During a recent presentation at the Rudd Center, Ronald Cotterill, Ph.D., the director of the Food Marketing Policy Center at University of Connecticut, let us in on a little secret about the pricing structure of milk and how it might relate to the disparities in obesity rates by economic status. He started by asking the group whether we had ever compared the price of whole vs. low-fat vs. skim milk. I could not remember doing so. If I had, I would have found out that they are all basically the same price.
During the 1984 presidential election campaign, Democratic candidate Walter Mondale famously attacked rival Senator Gary Hart’s lack of substantive positions during a televised campaign by asking “Where’s the beef?”
As you may have heard, last December the New York City Board of Health passed a rule that will require restaurants in the city with standardized menu items and published calorie information to post the calories per menu item directly next to and in the same font size as the price of the item. Health advocates hope that the information will lead to healthier offerings from restaurants and healthier choices by consumers.
I always watch Super Bowl advertisements with a certain sense of ambivalence. The ads are generally well-crated and amusing, but often support over-consumption, either of alcohol, gasoline, or food.
This year was no different. My initial extremely positive visceral reaction to Coca-Cola’s Black History Month “Timeline” ad turned sour upon reflection (when a Frito-Lay ad also implied reference to Black History Month, I began to ruminate more than usual). You can view the ads here.
The recent discussion on this blog about dietary supplement fraud raises the broader issue of our obsession with the search for a “cure” to obesity. For example, the BBC enthusiastically reported on an “obesity-busting gum” that may one day “tackle obesity,” even though the potential therapy is at least a decade away and has not even shown any effect on weight loss in its injectable form. Stranger still, the media reacted with great excitement when the FDA recently approved a canine weight-loss drug known as Slentrol. Pfizer, the drug’s manufacturer, estimates that 40 percent of U.S. dogs (17 million) are obese or overweight, but cautions that the $1-2/day drug should not be used in humans because it may cause diarrhea, vomiting and enzyme disorders (side effects also seen in some of the dogs on the treatment).
Continue reading "Take Two of These and Call Me after Brunch" »
