By Duff Wilson and Janet Roberts
Washington, D.C., April 27 (Reuters) – In the political
arena, one side is winning the war on child obesity.
The side with the fattest wallets.
After aggressive lobbying, Congress declared pizza a
vegetable to protect it from a nutritional overhaul of the
school lunch program this year. The White House kept silent last
year as Congress killed a plan by four federal agencies to
reduce sugar, salt and fat in food marketed to children.
And during the past two years, each of the 24 states and
five cities that considered “soda taxes” to discourage
consumption of sugary drinks has seen the efforts dropped or
defeated.
At every level of government, the food and beverage
industries won fight after fight during the last decade. They
have never lost a significant political battle in the United
States despite mounting scientific evidence of the role of
unhealthy food and children’s marketing in obesity.
Lobbying records analyzed by Reuters reveal that the
industries more than doubled their spending in Washington during
the past three years. In the process, they largely dominated
policymaking — pledging voluntary action while defeating
government proposals aimed at changing the nation’s diet, dozens
of interviews show.
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, the
Reuters analysis showed.
Industry critics also contend that the White House all but
abandoned a multi-agency effort that recommended healthier food
be marketed to children, even after First Lady Michelle Obama
told a grocery trade group two years ago that food manufacturers
needed to “step it up” to protect children.
“I’m upset with the White House,” said Senator Tom Harkin
(D-Iowa), chairman of the Senate Health Committee. “They went
wobbly in the knees. When it comes to kids’ health, they
shouldn’t go wobbly in the knees.”
The White House disputed the characterization . Sam Kass, an
assistant chef there and senior policy adviser on food
initiatives, said in a statement: “We are incredibly proud of
the commitments that many food companies have made, and are
continuing to work with others to advocate for even more change
to make sure our children are getting the healthy, nutritious
food they need.”
The political battles over what children eat and drink are
crucial to the nation’s health, experts say, because the
tripling in childhood obesity in the last three decades
foretells diabetes, heart disease and other illness in decades
to come. America is one of the fattest nations on earth, and the
Institute of Medicine, in a 2006 report requested by Congress,
said junk food marketing contributes to an epidemic of childhood
obesity that continues to rise. The institute is the health arm
of the National Academy of Sciences.
SHORTER LIFESPAN?
Health experts and Harkin say the food industry has employed
some of the same tactics as Big Tobacco in its efforts to fight
stricter regulations — chief among them the argument that the
industry should regulate itself.
Although no major legislative action on childhood obesity is
pending during this election year, the public debate is expected
to resume next month. The Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention (CDC) will hold a conference in Washington from May
7-9 called “Weight of the Nation.” It will include an Institute
of Medicine update and the premiere of an HBO documentary series
of the same name. Health advocates also plan a “Sugary Drinks
Summit” in Washington from June 7-8.
“We haven’t reversed the epidemic,” Dr. William H. Dietz,
director of the division of nutrition, physical activity and
obesity at the CDC, said in an interview. “This may be the first
generation of children that has a lower life span than their
parents.”
Food and beverage manufacturers and advertisers say they
aren’t to blame for obesity. Indeed, they say they are part of
the solution.
The American Beverage Association says its members have cut
88 percent of the calories shipped to schools since 2004 by
offering less sugary drinks and emphasizing water, low-fat milk
and juice in elementary and middle schools. The drinks now list
calories on the front of labels.
Sixteen major companies with about 75 percent of the food
ads on TV aimed at children under 12 are regulating themselves
under the Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative of
the Better Business Bureau. They are limiting ads for certain
foods and adopting nutrition standards.
“It’s made a big difference,” said Elaine D. Kolish, the
initiative director and a former head of enforcement at the
Federal Trade Commission. More than 100 products have been
changed or created to cut salt, fat, sugar or calories, she
said. Tougher self-regulation is promised by 2014.
At the same time, Kolish said, there is no proof of “a
causal effect between food advertising and obesity.”
The Institute of Medicine had found strong evidence that TV
watching was associated with child obesity. But researchers have
found no proof that obesity is directly caused by ads for sweets
or junk food.
Armed with those arguments and a bulging political war
chest, the $1.5 trillion food and beverage industry has defeated
soda taxes and marketing restrictions in cities and states
across the nation, mounting referendums to overturn the taxes in
the two states that passed them and persuading 16 states to
prohibit lawsuits over fatty foods.
Reuters analyzed spending reported by more than 50 food and
beverage groups that lobbied against the federal effort last
year to write tougher — but still voluntary — nutritional
standards for foods marketed to children.
The groups have spent more than $175 million lobbying since
President Barack Obama took office in 2009 — more than double
the $83 million spent in the previous three years, during the
Bush Administration.
The totals do not include broader lobbying efforts by the
Chamber of Commerce, the National Association of Manufacturers,
and media and advertising interests that also opposed the
federal plan. Those groups lobby on other issues, and lobbying
disclosure reports do not specify how much they spent targeting
the food marketing proposal. The Reuters analysis was based on
records from the Federal Election Commission, the Secretary of
the Senate and the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan
group that tracks money in politics.
In a stark example of lobbying muscle, PepsiCo Inc,
Coca-Cola Co, bottlers and the American Beverage
Association spent more than $40 million lobbying in 2009 when
Congress was considering a soda tax. That was more than eight
times the $4.8 million they had spent the previous year, the
analysis showed. After the proposal died, the groups cut
spending to $24 million in 2010 and $10 million in 2011.
In recent interviews, lobbyists, lawmakers, policy leaders
and industry insiders described the power of money in politics
and the appeal of self-regulation to explain how they have been
so successful countering legislation backed by public health
interests that they portrayed as overreaching.
The public health advocates ” hit a nerve,” said Marshall
Matz, a Washington lawyer and industry lobbyist who advised the
2008 Obama campaign on agricultural issues. “There’s a
bipartisan feeling you can tell someone to eat less fat, consume
more fiber, more fruits and vegetables and less sugar. But if
you start naming foods, you cross the line.”
WHITE HOUSE WITHDRAWAL
The effort to defeat the tougher food standards heated up
late last spring and summer, when lobbyists said they went on
high alert.
On July 12, White House visitor logs show a who’s who of
food company chief executives and lobbyists visited the White
House. The group met with Valerie Jarrett, Obama’s senior
adviser, and Melody Barnes, then director of the president’s
Domestic Policy Council. Among the group at the meeting: 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.
Two people who attended — lobbyist Scott Faber of the
Grocery Manufacturers Association and Kolish of the Better
Business Bureau — said the group told the White House that it
opposed government action and favored voluntary initiatives.
Other participants and the White House have declined to describe
the meeting or did not respond to requests for comment.
Advocates for tougher standards tried to counter the
lobbying surge, calling, emailing and visiting the White House
scores of times last year.
Margo Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for
Science in the Public Interest, recalled an Oct. 31 White House
visit that included 11 other representatives of nonprofit groups
who supported the food standards. The group met with Barnes,
White House visitor logs show. Among the advocates there that
day: the American Heart Association and Children Now.
The effort by the advocacy groups had little effect.
In the weeks after the meetings, proponents of tougher
standards said, neither the president nor the First Lady spoke
out for the work on healthy food guidelines that had been
drafted by the administration’s own agencies. And industry
representatives said their White House lobbying — which also
included calls, letters and visits to the White House — proved
successful on a hot political issue.
Wootan concedes as much. “There was so much industry
pushback that it led to a lot of foot-dragging,” she said. “The
president and White House were as much to blame as House
Republicans.”
Meanwhile, Michelle Obama’s childhood-obesity campaign
pivoted from criticizing foodmakers toward promoting exercise.
“We need you all to step it up,” she told the Grocery
Manufacturers Association in a March 2010 speech. “We need you
not just to tweak around the edges but to entirely rethink the
products that you’re offering, the information that you provide
about these products and how you market those products to our
children.”
By last November, Mrs. Obama was praising the manufacturers
for product improvements — “a fundamental shift in the Let’s
Move campaign,” according to the widely cited blog Obama
Foodorama. Instead, the First Lady (with free advertising from
broadcasters) emphasized exercise — a favored cause of
companies that lobbied against stricter food guidelines.
Nicholas W. Papas, a spokesman for the White House, disputed
the notion that it had failed to champion the work of its own
agencies. “The Obama Administration consistently supported the
Interagency Working Group and we were disappointed when Congress
granted the food industry’s requests and placed new demands on
the working group,” he said in a statement.
But Papas could not point to any specific example of the
president or First Lady voicing support for the working group
report. Lobbyists on both sides of the issue and two key members
of Congress said the administration stood back at crucial
junctures, allowing Congress time to thwart the effort.
Kelly D. Brownell, a Yale professor and director of the Rudd
Center for Food Policy and Obesity, said he believes the First
Lady has become too friendly with industry even as she has been
a passionate, effective advocate for healthier food and
exercise. He pointed to the possible influence of a 2010 Supreme
Court decision, criticized by the president, that removed limits
on corporate and union campaign spending.
“It does seem that there’s been a shift in priorities in the
Let’s Move campaign in an election year,” Brownell said. “And
with the Citizens United case and the companies being able to
lobby almost without limit, it’s not surprising that the White
House is more friendly toward the industry.”
Wootan had a similar view: “I’d focus more on exercise, too,
if my husband was up for re-election.”
The First Lady’s office declined to respond publicly to
questions about its support for the agencies’ proposed standards
for foods marketed to children, or charges that Let’s Move had
changed focus. Kass, the Let’s Move policy adviser, responded to
similar criticism last year from New York University nutrition
professor Marion Nestle by saying the emphasis on exercise added
to previous work on nutrition and was not a pullback from topics
that the industry opposes.
BIG TOBACCO’S PLAYBOOK
Although food and beverage companies say they are making
dramatic strides in self-regulation, their critics say they are
moving too slowly and trying to influence public opinion by
using some of the same approaches that tobacco companies used to
defend their products.
Kraft Foods, the nation’s largest food company, was
owned by Philip Morris, the nation’s largest tobacco company,
from 1988-2007. Philip Morris makes Marlboro cigarettes.
Brownell and Kenneth E. Warner, a professor and former dean
of the University of Michigan School of Public Health, have
written papers comparing Big Food to Big Tobacco.
Both industries dispute links between their products and ill
health, Brownell said — tobacco companies claiming cigarettes
don’t cause cancer and food companies saying there is no proof
that sugar causes obesity. Both have rewritten product labels
without making major changes, he said. And both emphasize
self-regulation — to Brownell, an effort to preempt government
standards.
“I can’t think of a single thing the food industry is doing
that the tobacco industry hasn’t done,” Brownell said.
Both industries also have relied on marketing to kids, he
said, and both use what Brownell called “front groups” with
consumer-oriented names that would not show their industry
connections.
The Center for Consumer Freedom is a nonprofit group led by
Washington lawyer and public relations executive Rick Berman.
Formerly known as Guest Choice Network, it was founded in 1995
with a $600,000 pledge from tobacco giant Philip Morris. Today,
the center attacks “food radicals” and runs websites including
obesitymyths.com. The group says it is funded by food and
restaurant companies but declines to name specific benefactors.
A group called Americans Against Food Taxes, calling itself
a “coalition of concerned citizens,” was formed in 2007 and has
been financed by sugary beverage makers to fight soda taxes. It
bought a 30-second ad during the 2011 Super Bowl.
Spokesmen for the food and beverage industries say comparing
their tactics to tobacco’s is unfair.
“Food processing is not an evil thing,” said Derek Yach,
PepsiCo’s senior vice president of global health and
agricultural policy and a former World Health Organization
official who was well-known as an adversary of sugar and tobacco
interests. He was hired by Pepsi, which also owns snack-food
maker Frito-Lay, five years ago.
“I might not agree with a lot of things we do, but are we on
a track where we’re struggling to get to the right place?
Absolutely,” Yach said. The industry is well-intentioned, he
said, focused on improving products and transparent in its fight
against higher taxes and marketing restrictions.
CANNING THE SODA TAX
Beverage companies showed their political clout in 2009 when
they faced a proposed penny-an-ounce tax on sugary drinks in a
Congress eager to raise money to pay for obesity-related health
care costs. The soda tax died in committee.
Other plans to tax soda have fizzled from coast to coast in
the past two years. Twenty-four states and five cities
considered them, according to the beverage association. None
passed except in Washington state, where legislators approved a
2-cent-a-can soda tax on the last day of the 2010 session.
Within a month, a trade group for Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Dr.
Pepper Snapple mounted a referendum campaign. It spent
$16 million, a state record for an initiative effort, to gather
signatures and flood the airwaves. The public voted 60 percent
against the tax.
The pro-tax group, outspent $37-to-$1, grumbled that the
soda group misled voters with TV ads that the Seattle Times
concluded were “mostly false” because they suggested a wide
range of grocery items also would be taxed. The beverage
industry mounted a similar $3.5 million campaign that knocked
out a soda tax in Maine in 2008.
When Governor David A. Paterson of New York proposed an 18
percent tax on sweetened drinks in 2009, he said he wanted to
raise money to treat obesity-related disease. Soda makers spent
$12.8 million lobbying and advertising against it, and PepsiCo
said the tax could affect its decision on whether to move more
than 1,000 bottling jobs to Connecticut. The governor withdrew
the proposal, and the company decided to keep its headquarters
in New York.
“We got smashed,” Paterson said in an interview. Labor
unions had joined the attack because they worried about losing
the Pepsi jobs, he added, comparing the soda lobby to a Mack
truck. Paterson also said soda makers “bought off” lawmakers
with donations and advertising even in districts where 40
percent of minority children were overweight or obese.
“We ran into the machine the way anti-smoking activists did
in the early ’60s,” he said. “It’s not a fight you’re going to
win right away.”
Pepsi spokeswoman Gina Anderson said the proposed soda tax
was “a serious concern and consideration” in the company’s
siting plans before the proposal died. The company decided last
year to renew its lease through 2015.
Michael Jacobson, executive director of the Center for
Science in the Public Interest, also compared the industry
tactics with those of alcohol, tobacco and nuclear power.
“It’s all the same playbook, isn’t it?” he said. “You lobby.
You make campaign contributions. You buy advertising. You
threaten to move your plant. You use your workers as lobbyists.”
The beverage association rejects the analogy. Its website
says, “If anyone is using the ‘tobacco playbook’ in their
tactics, it is some of these activists.” The group pointed to
two recent examples, both involving the New York City Department
of Health and both first reported by The New York Times.
In one, an email showed a city official asking, “What can we
get away with?” in anti-soda advertising. In the other, a photo
was altered on a subway poster that warned of the risks of
diabetes from sugary soda. It portrayed an overweight man as an
amputee. His right leg had been photographically removed. The
city health department declined to comment further on these
incidents.
Christopher Gindlesperger, a spokesman for the beverage
association, explained the group’s success in staving off soda
taxes this way: “People feel very confident they can decide what
to eat or drink without government help.”
SEMPER FRIES
Public health officials thought the least nutritional items
would drop off the government’s $10.5 billion school lunch
program last year when they announced the first menu overhaul in
15 years. White bread: gone. Milk: low or no fat only. Fruits
and vegetables: doubled. Portions: smaller.
Then Congress got involved — at the behest of potato and
pizza companies — to preserve French fries as a menu staple and
to declare pizza, with its tomato sauce, to be a vegetable.
Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.) was one champion of the
pizza rollback. Minnesota is home to Schwan Food Co, a private
company with nearly $3 billion in sales and 70 percent of the
school frozen pizza market. Klobuchar, who is running for
re-election this year, wrote a letter last June to the
Department of Agriculture. One sentence in it was identical to
that in a Schwan official’s later testimony before a Senate
committee. The similarity was first reported by Minnesota Public
Radio.
Both documents contained this statement: “By changing the
crediting, many tomato-based sauces and salsa-type applications
would no longer be factored into the weekly requirements for
vegetables.”
Klobuchar’s spokesman, Linden Zakula, said he could not
explain how the same language was used in the senator’s letter
because the aide who drafted it had left. He said Schwan was
among many constituents to contact the office. Schwan declined
to comment.
In fighting the menu change, the American Frozen Food
Institute spent $543,000 lobbying last year, up from $334,000 in
2010; Schwan spent $50,000, and ConAgra Foods Inc spent
$400,000. The companies also financed a group called the
Coalition for Sustainable School Meal Programs.
House Republicans, citing “overly burdensome and costly
regulations,” added language to a budget bill in November to
keep French fries and frozen pizza on the school lunch menu. The
measure took effect earlier this year.
FIRST AMENDMENT PROTECTION
James H. Davidson believes in the First Amendment. The
former college newspaper editor turned lawyer turned Senate aide
is now one of the most powerful lobbyists in Washington.
For two decades, Davidson has been the point man for the
advertising industry in free speech issues. More recently his
clients have also included food and beverage companies in
alliance with advertisers. They have joined forces to lead the
fight against the proposed government guidelines on sugar, salt
and fat in food marketed to 2- to 17-year-olds.
Davidson also says there is no proof that food marketing
causes obesity, and without it, there is no legal basis for
restricting the ads.
“The First Amendment protects this type of speech,” he said.
Other lobbyists pointed to the role of potentially unlimited
political donations in explaining how industry has been able to
so thoroughly defeat the proposed salt, sugar and fat
guidelines.
In 2009, Congress passed a measure proposed by Harkin and
Senator Sam Brownback (R-Kansas) to ask the FTC and three other
agencies — the CDC, the Department of Agriculture and the Food
and Drug Administration — to draft voluntary nutrition
standards for children’s food marketing. The two senators were
motivated by studies showing that children develop lifelong
preferences from watching ads that target them with saltier,
sweeter foods than adults.
“We are calling on the food industry to tackle this threat
and boldly reinvent the food marketplace,” FTC Chairman Jon
Leibowitz said at a hearing in December 2009. As for kids’
marketing, he noted, not only Congress but some companies wanted
government guidance. “We will have such a uniform framework in
place, we expect, by this summer,” Leibowitz said.
Summer came and went. Brownback left the Senate at the end
of 2010. When the draft guidelines were finally published in
April 2011 — to praise from health groups — business interests
say they were shocked by the low sugar and salt suggestions.
“These are voluntary guidelines,” Harkin said. “What’s the
industry so afraid of?” The companies said the recommendations
could become requirements and kill marketing of 88 of the 100
most popular food products, including Cheerios, whole wheat
bread and yogurt.
The industry mobilized. Food and media companies hired Anita
Dunn, former White House communications chief under Obama, to
run media strategy. The industry created a group called the
Sensible Food Policy Coalition. And it paid for a report that
said the restrictions would result in 75,000 lost jobs and $28.6
billion in lost revenue to companies — estimates based on the
supposition that the guidelines would cut one in five food ads.
Not true, government officials and public health advocates
said, arguing that industry had five years to improve the
products. A review of the report by three marketing professors
for the website politifact.com and the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution termed its findings “false.”
Nonetheless the report was widely circulated in Washington
and repeatedly cited in letters to the administration signed by
about 200 members of Congress from both parties. As the effort
gained momentum, congressional staff members and lobbyists
described calls and visits from chief executive officers of
companies.
The industry’s campaign, lobbyists say, focused on
Representative Jo Ann Emerson (R-Mo.) and Senator Dick Durbin
(D-Ill.), who chaired the appropriations subcommittee in each
chamber that funded the FTC.
Emerson knew Davidson, who had attended college in Missouri
and who had worked for Senator Stuart Symington (D-Mo.). In an
interview, Emerson said she opposed the food guidelines because
they would inevitably become mandatory. She said she learned how
that could hurt business while working for the National
Restaurant Association in the early 1990s. “I felt very
passionately about anything that’s voluntary,” she said.
Last December, Emerson wrote the budget bill provision that
stopped the guidelines, and she insisted on keeping the language
as the bill moved through a House-Senate conference committee.
It was a 55-word sentence in a 130-page omnibus budget bill,
requiring the agencies to do a cost-benefit analysis of their
recommendations before finishing the report. The agencies said
such a requirement was unprecedented for a voluntary guideline
and would prove far too expensive.
In the Senate, a lobbyist involved with the issue told
Reuters, Durbin simply needed to stay quiet so as not to make it
a partisan issue and eventually nudge Harkin into accepting
Emerson’s House provision. A Durbin spokesman, Max Gleischman,
said the senator agreed to the House language because the
industry was moving to regulate itself.
Durbin’s home state of Illinois is home to Kraft. Its
political action committee has been a regular contributor to his
campaign committee, donating $14,000 since 2007.
“There was an outcry across the spectrum of the business
community,” said Dan Jaffe, executive vice president of the
Association of National Advertisers. The proposal was too
extreme, Jaffe said, and in the end, “It fell of its own
weight.”
Said Jeff McIntyre, policy director for the advocacy group
Children Now: “We just got beat. Money wins.”
Harkin also pointed to the power of corporate money.
“They’ve scared some Democrats,” he said in an interview. “It
just shows you how heavy the lobbying is on the part of the
industry.”
Food and beverage groups targeting the proposed marketing
restrictions had given Harkin’s campaign more than $75,000 from
2007 through 2009. In 2010, after he helped initiate the push
for food marketing restrictions, they contributed nothing. They
gave him only $3,000 in 2011.
Comparing the last three years of the Bush administration to
the first three years of Obama’s, total campaign contributions
from the more than 50 food and beverage groups and companies
analyzed by Reuters were about the same. But during the Obama
administration, the contributions increased substantially to
some candidates who played key roles in warding off regulation.
Klobuchar, whose state is home to a number of large food
companies, benefitted most. Her campaign received more than
$160,000 in donations from 19 food and beverage groups during
the last three years, double what they had given her in the
three years prior. Her spokesman said there is no link between
the donations and policy.
Food companies tripled their contributions to Emerson, who
received more than $88,000 from the groups from 2009 through
2011. She received $39,000 in 2010 alone as she was poised to
become chair of a key House appropriations subcommittee.
Emerson said most Republicans probably got more
contributions when they became the House majority. However, the
Reuters analysis shows the food and beverage groups strongly
favored Republicans over Democrats, both before and after the
2010 election. On average over the last six years, they gave GOP
political committees $2 for every $1 donated to Democrats.
The FTC issued a statement after the budget provision
passed: “Congress has clearly changed its mind about what it
would like the Interagency Working Group to do with regard to
the report on food marketed to children.”
On March 5, FTC Chairman Leibowitz, answering a
congressman’s question in a hearing, said the effort to write
voluntary food standards was no longer an agency priority.
“It’s probably time to move on,” he said.
