Corporations Make Healthy Eating Choices Very Difficult

It's often been pointed out—including by me—that the large purveyors of fast food serve unhealthy food—high in fat, calories, and sodium—and thus bear some of the blame for the epidemic of obesity in America and increasingly in other countries as well, as we are exporting our obesity along with our culture and our food.

However, there is a sense in which they should not get the chief blame. With their triple cheeseburgers, they are giving the public what they want. Many people are not health-conscious or do not have the knowledge to make health-conscious decisions about what they eat. Or, other considerations may trump any issues of good nutrition.

But, there are many people who try to eat healthy; and often these people are not well-served by the corporations who make and sell our food.

There is a lot of misleading marketing of food. Many products like nutritional supplements make unsubstantiated claims. (These claims are not adequately regulated by the government; the labels must merely carry a fine-print statement saying, "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.")

Many products like energy drinks, energy bars, "power bars," and so forth are worthless. Many products that boast their fiber content contain so-called isolated fiber, which may not have the health benefits of natural fiber.

Many products made to sound healthy are full of unnatural and processed ingredients. For example, not yogurt but "yogurt powder"; not fruit but some concoction that's starch, sugar and coloring, with maybe a little fruit juice.

Some examples: According to the magazine Nutrition Action Health Letter, published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (the people who have made in-the-news exposés of movie-theater popcorn and so forth), the following products, which are pitched to those seeking gluten-free foods, may not be truly healthful:

• Glutino Gluten Free Blueberry Breakfast Bars, which are "junk" because their "blueberry filling" has more sugar, apple powder, white grape juice concentrate, and water than blueberries.
• Glutino "gluten-free pretzels coated with premium yogurt" are largely made of corn starch and potato starch; the yogurt coating contains yogurt listed as last among its ingredients, meaning that, by quantity, it's the smallest of the ingredients in the yogurt coating.
• Food Should Taste Good Sweet Potato All Natural Chips contain more corn and corn oil than sweet potato. And some "veggie chips" have more salt than some of the veggie-derived ingredients.

Brands, and stores, who might try to make us think they deal in healthy food, often are doing quite the opposite. The so-called "health food supermarkets" deal in food that is high in sodium. They have bakery departments that sell us concoctions of sugar and fat (though no canny consumer truly expects these things to be healthy).

So it's very much a case of "let the buyer beware." More and more of us these days eat more and more food that we do not prepare from scratch but is served to us or it comes in a package. And even those who want to eat healthy often have an almost impossible job when making their food-buying choices.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein

The People vs. the Republicans

The Republicans are getting some backlash which is much deserved, in my opinion. The shining example recently occurred when Kathy Hocul, a Democrat, defeated the heavily-financed Republican candidate in a special election for the Congressional seat in the 26th District of New York State.

All eyes were on this election, and it was viewed as very largely a referendum on Medicare: That is, the defeat of the Republican is thought to have been because the Republicans are now perceived to favor cuts in Medicare, since the federal budget proposed by Republican budget-writer Paul Ryan would cut Medicare benefits.

Now, seniors (those who benefit from and who are literally the beneficiaries of Medicare) tend to be conservative in their voting, particularly on social issues. But they are a well-organized lobby, and when it comes to even threatening their government benefits (or, I should say, entitlements), they will get their backs up.

So, if the election which Hocul won really was a referendum on Medicare, I am glad that, for once, a popular message has been sent to Republicans. (Let's hope they get the message. We'll only know that they did when they begin to moderate some of their positions. You'd think they'd perceive what is in their self-interest, but they have not always been smart enough to do so.)

In my view, too often the "man in the street" does not, cannot, perceive that the Republican party is the representative of wealthy individuals and corporations. Corporate interests (made all the more influential since the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision, which removes restrictions on corporate political contributions) buy the votes, in Congress, through their army of highly paid lobbyists, and through out-and-out contributions to those candidates' election and re-election. Thus, Republican legislators are unabashedly beholden to corporate interests, which tend to have interests contrary to those of the public.

The Medicare thing should make people realize that they Republicans pretty generally have no sympathy for the poor, the elderly, the unemployed--anyone for whom a more compassionate government provides a "safety net." The latest example—more recent than Paul Ryan's to-hell-with-Medicare budget—is that Republicans now want to cut funding for the FDA (Food and Drug Administration), which is charged with keeping our food (and medicines) pure and safe. In a rather typical example of their very odd logic (to put it mildly), the Republicans claim that reducing the funding to the FDA—which already lacks adequate resources to inspect food producers and processors, so that we have had numerous outbreaks of food-borne illness like Salmonella—will somehow contribute to, rather than undermine, the safety of the food which every single American must eat. Evidently it's again that extreme free-market thinking that says, Just leave them alone (free from regulation and other government "interference" such as inspections) and they will do the right thing, and we'll all be better off. How absurd. Any time—and let's acknowledge that this happens, often—that the corporate bottom line conflicts with what benefits customers and the public, you know which gets put first by the corporations—and by their Republican lackeys in Congress.

Update/Correction, May 26, 2011
1) The election which Hocul won was indeed regarded as a referendum on the treatment of Medicare in the Paul Ryan budget proposal because Hocul's opponent had specifically endorsed the proposed Medicare changes.
2) It was not exactly correct to say that the Ryan budget proposal would cut Medicare. Ryan's idea is to replace government-run Medicare with private insurance. This is in line with far-right ideological notions that Medicare and even Social Security are "socialist" programs, that everything should be left to the private sector and as little as possible administered by the government. Going back at least to Ronald Reagan, conservatives have been telling us that government is bad, or is bad as long as it is as big as it is--never mind that they themselves are part of "government." Somehow the inconsistency does not occur to them. "Oh yes, the body politic is evil and too big, so I guess (being part of it) I'll cut my arm off."

Update, May 26, 2011
Tim Pawlenty, a possibility for the Republican presidential nomination, has announced he supports Paul Ryan's Medicare proposals. Is he too stupid to have learned from the Hocul election? Of course I don't mind if any particular Republican, or even the whole party, self-destructs.

Update, May 27, 2011
Here I mention, for the third time, the Citizens United decision. I gave an incorrect impression, that that decision permits corporate contributions directly to candidates. It does not; rather, it permits corporations to fund, for example, advertising on issues rather than candidates. (Thus we see TV "public service announcements" that advocate for or against a certain position or proposed law, and their sponsorship by corporations or industry trade groups is disguised by a statement such as "Paid for by Citizens for Such-and-Such.") However, in today's news, a judge has ruled that corporate contributions to candidates are legal.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein