Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own (28 page)

I totally agree with the advice Cornett offers other government leaders who want to emulate his success. “Most elected officials don’t want to preach the message of what you eat and how much you eat because it seems invasive. Many government initiatives on obesity fail because they end up becoming just exercise programs. That shouldn’t just be a message for overweight people; that ought to be a message for
everybody
. I think it’s wrong to suggest that obese people can just exercise their way out of obesity. It’s about what you eat and how much you eat, and we have not run from that message.”

New York City’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg is another public figure who thinks that government has a really important role to play in turning back the tide of obesity. He’s my hero because he has gotten out there, ignited a conversation, and has even been sued as he pushes to make this issue a priority.

Under his watch, New York City began requiring chain restaurants with more than fifteen locations to post the calorie counts of their food. At least twenty other cities have followed his example since the law went into effect in 2008. New York
also banned trans fat, a solid fat that is a leading cause of heart disease. Other municipalities picked up on that idea, too, and after the ball got rolling McDonald’s and some of the other fast-food chains decided to eliminate trans fat from all their outlets nationwide.

Bloomberg also called on the New York State legislature to impose a tax on soda. That failed to pass, but public health officials and researchers say it would have a meaningful effect on how much soda we drink, and I’d like to see other elected officials take up the issue.

The mayor’s latest accomplishment was to ban sales of soda and other sugary drinks in containers larger than sixteen ounces in restaurants, movie theaters, sports stadiums, and other entertainment venues. The soft-drink industry, joined by other business groups, sued to halt that regulation in October 2012.

I really admire the example Mayor Bloomberg is setting because politicians just have to make this a priority. Some people accuse me of calling for a “Nanny State” by welcoming the government into our supermarkets and restaurants and now, with my support for the large-size soda ban, even movie theaters. But I contend that the government
already
plays a real big role in how we eat, especially through the massive subsidies it provides to big agriculture. So it is not a new idea to involve government, it’s just a matter of changing the way we involve it.

“The fact is, we already have the nanny state, because we’ve already been told what to eat by the food industry,” points out Dr. Robert Lustig, the pediatric endocrinologist who has called sugar a toxic ingredient. “If you ask me, we’d be better off with a nanny state that has public health, not private profit, as its motive.”

We already have the nanny state, because we’ve already been told what to eat by the food industry . . . we’d be better off with a nanny state that has public health, not private profit, as its motive.

—
Robert Lustig

I think the federal government can do a lot more to join the conversation, and to demonstrate the leadership and political will to change some of the policies that promote obesity. We should all be pushing our elected officials to act.

Ed Rendell, the former Pennsylvania governor, and Donny Deutsch were on
Morning Joe
one day, and as we were chatting afterward, Donny said, “Can you imagine if we could eradicate obesity? Everything else would follow. Our health care costs would go down, and our health in general would be better. Everything would change in this country.”

Can you imagine if we could eradicate obesity? . . . Our health care costs would go down, and our health in general would be better. Everything would change in this country.—
Donny Deutsch

He’s right, which is why obesity needs to be at the top of the agenda in Washington. I challenge our politicians to explain why it isn’t. Someday soon, instead of saying “economy, economy, economy” we need to start saying “obesity, obesity, obesity.” We’ve got to. Because, as Senator Claire McCaskill points out, the two issues are so closely tied together. “It would be a
relatively painless way for our country to soar with a completely sound fiscal footing if we could put a dent in this increasing epidemic of us eating cheap food in portions that could strangle a horse,” she says. “Making that food primary in our diets is going to break our country if we’re not careful.”

One thing our public officials can do is use the bully pulpit, just as First Lady Michelle Obama has with her “Let’s Move” campaign, which is dedicated to ending childhood obesity. Her initiative includes commonsense strategies to educate parents, provide healthier food in schools, help children become more active, and make sure all families have access to healthy, affordable food.

I believe we also urgently need to change the nation’s farm policy, especially the agricultural supports that make processed food much less expensive than most fresh foods. Robert Lustig maintains that our current approach to crop subsidies makes sweeteners so inexpensive that “80 percent of the food items that are available in the US food supply are currently laced with sugar.”

With a lot of research indicating that sugar can make us sick, Lustig says the government winds up paying twice.

“The government paying for food subsidies is, number one, breaking the bank. We don’t need these subsidies. We don’t have the Dust Bowl. We don’t have farmers who are in trouble. We don’t have a hungry population that needs dried, storable food. Number two, all the disease that comes of it, the government ends up paying for in the form of Medicare and Medicaid. So no wonder Medicare is going broke.”

Meanwhile, average Americans find it harder to afford a healthy diet of fresh fruits and vegetables, and schools struggle
to find the funds to comply with new federal nutritional standards. That tells me we should think more about how government can help make good food less costly than bad food. As Dr. Zeke Emanuel says, “We’re not going to be able to raise the cost of school lunches that much, given budget realities, and so we’ve got to think about how we can bring the price of the healthier food components down.”

A lot of people tell me we can do that by overhauling the Farm Bill, which is the key federal legislation guiding agricultural policies in this country. Instead of rewarding huge mega-farms, we should be giving more support to smaller farms, especially organic ones that supply local food networks with fruits and vegetables. If we want families to eat better food, that’s where we should be spending public dollars.

I’m very encouraged to have Senator Kirsten Gillibrand sitting on the Agriculture Committee, the first representative from New York in forty years. She takes a vastly different approach toward food issues than senators who hail from states that produce commodity crops, especially corn, soybeans, and rice. I am with her all the way.

Gillibrand says she wants to “create a framework that’s focused on having safety nets or insurance for farmers when they go through a storm or a bad weather condition that takes a toll on crops. What we’re also hoping to do is enhance programs that are ‘farm to fork,’ getting whole foods directly into our public schools.”

As a mom and a policy maker, Senator Gillibrand is also backing the federal Healthy Foods Financing Initiative. I think that initiative is one of the most important tools for nourishing the 25 million people in America who live in areas known
as “food deserts”; that is, inner-city neighborhoods, rural areas, and other communities where good-quality markets don’t exist and people don’t have easy access to fresh, healthy foods. This legislation would provide grants to help existing grocery stores, farmers’ markets, and food co-ops sell fruits and vegetables at affordable prices, and draw new food businesses into areas where they don’t currently exist.

I also agree with the experts who say the government should require better labels on our food and more transparency in the industry so that people have a fuller understanding about what they are eating, and what it does to them. The US Food and Drug Administration is talking about revising the current label and requiring calorie counts to be posted more prominently. I also hope we will see more specific information about sugar content so we know just how much sugar is added to each serving of food.
New York Times
columnist Mark Bittman has another suggestion I like: put a traffic light logo on the label. A green light would be for food you can eat all the time, a cautionary yellow light would describe foods you should eat only once in a while, and a red light would warn about food that should be avoided altogether.

We also need to push our political leaders to get involved in refocusing the food industry. “We can’t all go back to hunting or trapping or growing our own food,” acknowledges Robert Lustig. Instead, “we need a new food system, one that works for the populace, one that doesn’t overfeed them, one that doesn’t cause significant chronic disease, and one that actually protects
the environment. How is that going to happen when the only thing the food industry is interested in is making money?”

The answer is that government has to pressure food businesses, and for that to happen, Americans need to pressure their government. It’s not a matter of what’s in the government’s best interest, it’s what’s in the best interest of the people.

I think that legal action against the food industry is one of the ways we can bring about broader changes. As more conversation about the causes of obesity and disease takes place, and Americans become more educated about the food system, this is beginning to happen. Some of the same lawyers who went after the tobacco industry decades ago are now going after Big Food.

“Fat and food have become the new tobacco,” says John Banzhaf, one of the first attorneys to take legal action against smoking in the mid-1960s. Banzhaf is a public interest law professor at George Washington University and founder of Action on Smoking and Health. “Those legal actions against smoking had a lot to do with changing the mind of the public. In the fifties, sixties, seventies, eighties, even early nineties, most people blamed smoking solely on the smoker. It was his fault, it was his bad choice, it was his lack of responsibility.”

Fat and food have become the new tobacco.

—
John Banzhaf

To me, that sounds very much like the way we have looked at obesity.

Initially, nobody thought to lay blame for smoking on the tobacco industry. That began to shift, Banzhaf said, “as the
revelations came out about how they promoted addiction, about how they lied, how they were underhanded. I think people began seeing that while personal responsibility plays a role, and people shouldn’t smoke, at least part of the responsibility lay with those who were promoting it.”

Again, I see a parallel with obesity and the aggressive marketing of fast foods. Still another similarity is that anti-smoking measures began to take hold when we discovered how adversely nonsmokers were affected by secondhand smoke. Likewise, as we recognize how the costs of too much weight affect us all, in higher taxes and inflated health insurance premiums, for example—we also recognize that everyone has a stake in dealing with the problem.