Obsessed: America's Food Addiction--And My Own (29 page)

By mid-2012, twenty-five lawsuits had been filed against companies like ConAgra Foods, General Mills, and PepsiCo contending that they are mislabeling their products and thus misleading consumers.
⁵
These high-profile cases have forced companies to change, especially companies that value their public image.

“They are much more worried that this is going to hurt them than tobacco companies ever were,” Banzhaf says. “Tobacco companies already wear a very, very black hat. The food companies are reacting to the fact that we are beginning to place a black hat on them.”

While the tobacco industry couldn’t make a less hazardous cigarette, the food industry has a wider range of possible responses. “When you sue the fast food companies they can do things. They
are
doing things,” Banzhaf says. “They are lowering the calorie count in some of their foods. They have introduced
more nutritious entrees. They have provided increased disclosure of fats.”

Walmart is one of the leaders here, reducing the salt and fat in some of the food they sell. “They’re the big gorilla, the single biggest grocery seller in the world,” said Zeke Emanuel. “Their decision will first and foremost shape their private label, but after that it will also affect a lot of the other products they sell. And a lot of manufacturers are going to take the products that they’re selling at Walmart and distribute them more widely. So I’m strongly anticipating a very big effect throughout the manufactured-food industry.”

Still, I wouldn’t expect the food industry to voluntarily make all the changes we need. The lawyers are still likely to have a role. And legal action will eventually lead to new statutes and regulations. “We will litigate until they legislate,” says Banzhaf. “In our country there have been quite a number of movements, including the civil rights movement, which started with litigation, because there was very little public support for significant change. The only way to begin the change, to kick down the door, to arouse public attention, and then get legislative attention was through lawsuits.”

Here it might be helpful to identify some of the new statutes and regulations which have already been sparked by the fat law suits. For example, New York City and then California required the disclosure of calories in foods at many chain restaurants, including fast food ones, and this requirement will apply nationwide in 2014 as a result of the Obamacare statute. More than two dozen jurisdictions now have a tax on or aimed at sugary soft drinks. Many states followed the example triggered
by litigation in New York City and are restricting what foods can be sold and/or even brought into schools. Some jurisdictions are prohibiting establishing fast food outlets within
x
number of yards of schools. And, of course, New York City has banned trans fats in foods and limited the sale of sugary soft drinks in movies and many other venues to only sixteen ounces.

I say it’s time to declare war on obesity. I know it is not going to be easy to win, as Nancy Snyderman explains. “Never before has the human race been threatened by a profound overabundance of food,” she says. “Cheap, affordable, toxic food that coincides with a loss of American sidewalks, the raping of public schools and taking away gym classes, and a technological environment that invites people to do more by doing less. It’s the perfect storm of societal issues that I think will doom the next generation if we allow it.”

Never before has the human race been threatened by a profound overabundance of food.

—
Nancy Snyderman

We can’t allow it. The problem threatens our health, our wealth, and our national security, and I’m convinced that together we can make the commitment to solve it. It will take education, government regulations, legal action, and commitment at every level of society, but tobacco showed us how much is possible. At one time, half of all American adults smoked; now fewer than 18 percent of them do. Turning that around took a combination of things.

“It wasn’t just doctors talking to patients, it wasn’t just getting rid of the advertising, it wasn’t just raising the prices, and it wasn’t just changing social attitudes and driving smokers off campuses,” says Zeke Emanuel. It was all of that and more.

So it has to be with food, he says. “We have to get smaller plates, we have to get better labeling, we have to get the price differential reduced so that the healthy thing is not the more expensive thing. All of these things are going to be important in getting our arms around the obesity epidemic.”

       
•
  
Start talking honestly about what needs to change.
Hold constructive and public conversations about weight, body image, and how we produce, distribute, market, and eat food in America. Put the word
fat
back into our vocabulary and start using other blunt and forceful language. It’s not enough to say “eat more fruits and vegetables.” We also need to say “here are the foods that are killing us.”

       
•
  
Publicize the costs of obesity.
The idea is not to stigmatize plus-size Americans, but to allow government officials and employers to break out their calculators and see whether programs to prevent or reverse obesity are worth the investment.

       
•
  
Insist that our leaders lead.
People with influence and authority at every level—in federal, state, and
local government, in the workplace, in the health care system, and in the schools—should help promote the broad changes that will get us on a healthier path.

       
•
  
Establish a federal obesity commission.
I’d like to see smart recommendations, based on science, coming from the top about how to build healthier communities, incorporate incentives for weight loss into our health care system, make healthier foods more affordable, promote behavior change, and much more.

       
•
  
Fund more scientific research.
Losing and regaining weight involves complicated biology, and we need to learn more about that. We also need to understand whether food really can become addictive and what messages will get people to act.

       
•
  
Overhaul the food climate in this country.
There are a million public policy opportunities to make a difference. For starters, we should change the crops we subsidize, eliminate food deserts, revise the food label, and levy taxes on soda and other unhealthy food.

       
•
  
Educate the public at every opportunity.
Our health care professionals should talk about weight with their patients, our markets should install touch screens to provide more information about what’s in the food they sell, and people who have succeeded should share their secrets with those who have not.

       
•
  
Make our kids the first priority.
There is lots more we can do to improve the quality of school lunches,
teach kids more about food, and get them moving. Teachers should talk to parents about their kids’ weight. And there is no excuse for selling sugary drinks and snacks in school vending machines.

       
•
  
Forge a healthful vision in small towns and big cities.
Let’s make communities that work—with sidewalks, bike paths, easy-to-access and safe recreational activities, farmers’ markets, and stores that have an incentive to sell fresh and healthy food.

       
•
  
Celebrate a healthy thin in the media.
Enough with the ultraskinny models. Let’s show photographs of what real and healthy bodies look like.

M
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et’s go back into our homes now and talk about what else we have to do to get our children on the right path and keep them there. Nothing is more important to me, because I am passionate about preventing my daughters from struggling with food the way Diane and I have. It just takes up too much brain space, and it’s too risky for their health.

I’ll keep arguing for creating an environment that promotes a healthy thin for our kids. As I’ve said, schools, businesses, health care providers, and government can and should do a lot more.

But we can’t hand off all the responsibility. We have to fight back together against a food industry that targets kids with billions of dollars in marketing, a media industry that tries to impose its own notions of healthy bodies on the rest of us,
and a diet industry that says weight loss is easy if you just buy this or that product.

Teaching our children how to resist all that has to begin at home. That’s where we can control the conversation.

We’ve got to take food back. We need to be in charge, to take ownership over what we buy and what we cook, and make it a priority, because it is going into our children’s bodies and we have to make it healthy for them. As parents, we have an obligation to provide a firm grounding in smart eating so that when we send our kids into the world, they are as prepared as possible for the assault they will face. That’s what it takes if they are not to become that generation of overweight and obese kids whose life span is shorter than that of their parents.

So how do we get our kids to eat well and to develop a healthy body image? What’s the right way to talk about this with them? What do we say? What do we not say?

Talking about weight with your children is like threading your way through a minefield. Too much, and you worry that your child loses self-esteem or latches on to disordered eating. Too little, and you risk a child whose weight makes her a target of bullying and sets her up for a lifetime of health problems.

I turned again to the experts for their thoughts and guidance.

Everyone agrees on two things: good eating habits matter, and parents need to model good behavior. “We use the term
junk
food
as if it’s an innocuous thing,” says Dr. David Katz, “but it is the construction material for the body and the brain of that growing child of yours. We would not countenance building a house out of junk. We would not sanction driving a car built out of junk, and yet we look around every day at children being built out of junk and everybody’s okay with it. There’s something profoundly wrong with that.”

We use the term
junk food
as if it’s an innocuous thing, but it is the construction material for the body and the brain of that growing child of yours.

—
David Katz

Changing that begins with parents, says Canyon Ranch’s Lisa Powell. Their role “is to choose and prepare a healthy menu, and to model healthy eating behavior that’s neither restrictive nor overeating.”

Lisa gets frustrated by parents who bring their children in to see her and say, essentially, “Fix my kid” without looking at their own eating patterns. “Sometimes I want to shake them and say, ‘You brought this food into the house!’ That’s the mother and father’s responsibility: to decide what is going to be available in the house and how meals are going to be structured.”

Dr. Emily Senay agrees. “Take them to the store, shop in the vegetable aisle, let them help you prepare food, get them involved in the process. You can’t stop them from eating junk food outside the home, but if you give them information and continue to model healthy eating behavior at home, eventually kids will eat more like their parents.”