![Dieting_l[1]](https://ritarrobison.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/TPImport/6a00e55008157688340133eded6f00970b.jpg)
After I received a flood of e-mails recently from The Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation – a group of retailers, food and beverage manufacturers, and trade associations – about an educational campaign it was undertaking on childhood obesity, I wrote a post about how consumers can’t count on the food industry to improve the quality of the food supply through voluntary actions.
This week I received another e-mail from the foundation. It has signed an agreement with the Partnership for a Healthier America, a foundation of health care organizations and other groups, pledging to take actions aimed at reducing 1.5 trillion product calories by the end of 2015. As an interim step, the foundation will seek to reduce calories by 1 trillion in 2012.
Sounds laudable, but, again, will voluntary actions by the food industry reduce the rates of obesity in American, especially among children?
Harold Goldstein, DrPH, executive director of the California Center for Public Health Advocacy, sent me an e-mail questioning the foundation’s announcement. Goldstein said:
First, it is good to see that the food industry is acknowledging their central role in America’s obesity epidemic, and is proposing to take initial steps to resolve the crisis they’ve helped create.
We are, however, both confused and concerned about today’s food industry announcement. They didn’t describe any specific changes they plan to make in a single food or beverage product, calling that ‘highly confidential information.’ This means that their only announcement is that they have a secret plan that they can’t talk about. So at this point there is no way to determine if their commitment is sincere or if it is just another PR campaign attempting to undermine efforts around the country to establish federal, state, and local policies to improve access to healthy foods.
If they are sincere about making change, we hope they will be much more forthcoming and share with America not only their goal, but the real efforts they will be taking to make it a reality.
Goldstein’s right. The food industry owes it to American consumers to honestly help solve the nation’s obesity problems, not set up “smoke and mirrors” programs.
For example, Heinz has announced it will reduce the sodium in Ketchup by 15 percent. That’s a step in the right direction since Americans consume two to three times as much sodium as they need daily. However, Heinz has said nothing about reducing or removing high fructose corn syrup from Ketchup. One tablespoons of Heinz Ketchup has 4 grams of sugar.
American consumers and federal, state, and local governments need to demand that the food industry provide healthier food for us and our children.
![P051110SA-0150[1]](https://ritarrobison.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/TPImport/6a00e55008157688340133ed8a0f47970b.jpg "Federal government chooses voluntary actions over regulations to curb obesity")
These kinds of foods are so cheap and plentiful because the ingredients (mainly corn) are heavily subsidized by the government.
I don’t think it makes sense to subsidize corn production with federal tax dollars and then place a federal tax on products that use corn. Why don’t we just stop subsidizing corn production and prices for these goods will rise on their own.
This is interesting. As a performance measurement expert in my management consulting career, I feel that I have some insight into outcome measures, such as those proposed by this foundation. It occurs to me that a reduction in raw calorie totals means nothing. The industrialization of agriculture has achieved such reductions, for instance. According to Michael Pollan, you would have to eat 2.5 apples today to get the same nutritional benefit as an eating an apple in 1955, thanks to the decimation of the soils in which produce now is grown. He describes these as being little more now than conveyance mediums for chemicals. So I ask this: is it really about calories or about human outcomes? Education, market alternatives based on sound public health policy as opposed to GNP . . . isn’t that what we should be talking about. You know, while on a recent trip to the Upper Midwest, a talked for a long time to a guy in Wausau, Wisconsin who owns a little natural foods store. He told me that – from a cost perspective – it is so cheap to locally grow healthier crops using renewable techniques that – from a market persepctive – if most agricultural food sources were local, it would make healthier foods more price competitive with the cheap poisons of fast foods. But the reason this kind of market does not take hold is that big business have nationalized agriculture on behalf of the government (in truly fascist form). Their main concern is distribution costs, so they like to over grow some easily nationally transportable crops at the expense of a viable market alternative that would help people. In effect, once we allowed profits, 401K slopes and this elusive concept of the economy to become the basis of our economy, we pretty much ensured gradual wreckages in public welfare and increasing drifts between people who can afford to be free and those who cannot.
Enjoyed the article Rita.
Best regards,
John
Oops. Second appearance of word “economy” following the phrase “basis of” should have said “public policy.”
If you think that the food industry plays the “central role in America’s obesity epidemic” then what role do the people who eat the food play? The chorus? And what about the couch, television, and video game manufacturers?
You chastise Heinz for keeping high fructose corn syrup in their ketchup, but changing to refined sugar like Hunt’s has announced won’t make ketchup any healthier. Even Hunt’s acknowledges that the switch was motivated by consumer pressure, not real health reasons.
Nice, and thanks for sharing this info with us.Good Luck!