How Big Food Lobbying Is Defeating Anti-Obesity Efforts

One of the rec­om­men­da­tions intended to speed things up is for the food indus­try to “take broad, com­mon, and urgent vol­un­tary action to make sub­stan­tial improve­ments” to mar­ket­ing aimed at kids. This is cer­tainly impor­tant, as advo­cates have for years been sound­ing the alarm about the intractable prob­lem of junk food mar­ket­ing to chil­dren and its con­nec­tion to poor health. But another part of the IOM dic­tate sounded vaguely familiar:

If such mar­ket­ing stan­dards have not been adopted within two years by a sub­stan­tial major­ity of food, bev­er­age, restau­rant, and media com­pa­nies that mar­ket foods and bev­er­ages to chil­dren and ado­les­cents, pol­icy mak­ers at the local, state, and fed­eral lev­els should con­sider set­ting manda­tory nutri­tional stan­dards for mar­ket­ing to this age group to ensure that such stan­dards are implemented.

Two years? Where have I heard that dead­line before? Oh yes, it was another IOM report, this one focused entirely on food mar­ket­ing to chil­dren, from 2005, which reviewed the sci­ence show­ing a clear con­nec­tion between junk food mar­ket­ing and children’s dietary habits. That report said if vol­un­tary efforts by indus­try to clean up its act were unsuc­cess­ful, “Congress should enact leg­is­la­tion man­dat­ing” a shift in adver­tis­ing. Also, that “[w]ithin 2 years the Secretary [of health] should report to Congress on the progress and on addi­tional actions nec­es­sary to accel­er­ate progress.”

So it’s been 5 years since that ear­lier dead­line has passed and now the food indus­try has 2 more years to show how much it really cares about kids? Did any­one at IOM bother to check its ear­lier reports before writ­ing this one? But it’s hardly IOM’s fault. If any­one is to blame for lack of action on this issue, it’s Congress and the White House, as two recent reports make painfully clear.

An in-depth inves­ti­ga­tion by Reuters describes the dirty details of the onslaught of Big Food lob­by­ing in the wake of an effort by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment to improve vol­un­tary guide­lines on food mar­ket­ing to kids. Reuters found that food and bev­er­age lob­by­ists spent more than $175 mil­lion lob­by­ing since President Obama took office in 2009, more than dou­ble that spent in the pre­vi­ous three years, dur­ing the Bush Administration. “In con­trast, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, widely regarded as the lead lob­by­ing force for health­ier food, spent about $70,000 lob­by­ing last year—roughly what those oppos­ing the stricter guide­lines spent every 13 hours.”

Reuters also exam­ined lob­by­ing vis­its to the White House, find­ing that a “who’s who of food com­pany chief exec­u­tives and lob­by­ists vis­ited the White House” including:

CEOs of Nestle USA, Kellogg, General Mills, and top exec­u­tives at Walt Disney, Time Warner, and Viacom, owner of the Nickelodeon children’s channel—companies with some of the biggest finan­cial stakes in mar­ket­ing to chil­dren. Those com­pa­nies have a com­bined mar­ket value of more than $350 billion.

Another damn­ing report emerged this month from the Sunlight Foundation found sim­i­lar influ­ence from Big Food. The strat­egy was for indus­try lob­by­ists to give money to mem­bers of Congress in exchange for their send­ing let­ters object­ing to fed­eral agency efforts. Here is how Sunlight describes one such transaction:

Days after receiv­ing sev­eral cam­paign checks from the food lobby last May, Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat who is up for re-election this year, sent a let­ter rais­ing con­cerns about the Federal Trade Commission’s efforts to develop vol­un­tary guide­lines aimed at ton­ing down the mar­ket­ing of junk food to kids.

Seems Klobuchar wasn’t the only Democrat on the dole. Sunlight found that while most letter-writers were Republicans, lob­by­ist cam­paign dona­tions held par­tic­u­lar sway with Senate Democrats. Those who wrote let­ters of objec­tion “col­lected on aver­age, more than twice as much cam­paign money from food lob­by­ing inter­ests since 2008 as those who did not write let­ters.” A sim­i­lar pat­tern also held in the House, where 38 Democrats wrote let­ters of protest.

As Jeff McIntyre, pol­icy direc­tor for the advo­cacy group Children Now told Reuters: “We just got beat. Money wins.” That’s why it’s irrel­e­vant how many more rec­om­men­da­tions or dead­lines come from the Institute of Medicine or any other panel of experts on how to “accel­er­ate” progress. The only thing get­ting accel­er­ated is lob­by­ing dol­lars into politi­cians’ pock­ets. And kids’ poor health.

Michele Simon

Michele is a pub­lic health lawyer who has been research­ing and writ­ing about the food indus­try and food pol­i­tics since 1996. Visit her site at www.EatDrinkPolitics.com