Children's nutrition and competitive foods in schools

The Government Accountability Office last month completed an eloquent study (.pdf) of the economics of junk food and other "competitive foods" sold by schools.

First, some definitions. USDA generally provides almost no regulation of "competitive foods," which are foods and drinks sold a la carte in cafeterias or in vending machines outside of the parameters of the National School Lunch Program and School Breakfast Program. The one slight exception is that USDA does provide some exceedingly mild regulation of "foods of minimal nutritional value," such as candy and sugary sodas, which may not be sold inside cafeterias during the actual school lunch period. As we noted earlier, the department refuses even to enforce that mild rule. Some unregulated competitive foods may be comparatively healthy, but others are not. If I understand correctly, many junk foods, such as potato chips or ice cream, are not regulated as foods of minimal nutritional value.

In some sense, the GAO study paints a bleak picture of school food authorities that are addicted to the revenue from competitive foods and a U.S. Department of Agriculture unwilling even to use the full extent of the minimal powers it has to provide some help. The revenue involved is massive, exceeding $125,000 per school in the highest-revenue high schools (30 percent of all high schools).

Ultimately, however, the report is constructive rather than depressing. First, I was relieved to see that most of the revenue from competitive foods other than soda pouring rights contracts goes to School Food Authorities (the district-level folks who manage federal school meals programs). This improves the options for new policies that restrict unhealthy competitive foods while using federal food program reimbursements to ensure that School Food Authorities are not grievously harmed by the change. The pouring rights contracts, by contrast, often benefit the school administration more directly, so it is harder to strike a grand bargain using the revenue from school meals programs as the lever to hold the school adminstration harmless from better nutrition policies. However, the soda pouring rights contracts are so blatantly awful, that I think it is possible for policy change (especially State level policy change) to make them illegal without as much political need to find new funding to compensate. All reasonable people recognize that schools, acting in loco parentis, never should have been making such backroom deals with soda companies in the first place.

Second, the GAO study provides a wonderfully clear analysis of the surmountable barriers to improving the nutrition situation in schools, and it includes a great detailed desciption of how people in specific school districts made improvements. It cites this report this year from the Centers for Disease Control and other agencies, which I had not seen previously, describing what can be done constructively. Here is the GAO's conclusion.

Our nation’s schools are uniquely positioned to positively influence the eating habits of children, yet almost all schools sell readily available foods that are largely unregulated by the federal government in terms of nutritional content. While not all of these competitive foods are unhealthy, many are. Although schools cannot be expected to solve the current problems with child nutrition and growing obesity alone, many states and districts have begun efforts to improve the nutritional environments in their schools.

As districts across the country develop their required wellness policies by school year 2006-2007, they will likely face decisions and challenges similar to those of the districts we studied and may benefit from their lessons learned. Although each district took a different approach, all of them recognized the value of including those parties affected by the changes, such as parents, teachers, and other community members, when developing new policies. In addition, they recognized that students are the ultimate consumers of competitive foods and took steps to consider
their opinions.

[Update later that evening: the Associated Press' excellent food and agriculture reporter Libby Quaid has this article on the report.]

Monsanto's fan mail for Bitter Greens Journal

The Bitter Greens Journal, featured in the sidebar, received an interesting letter from Monsanto about the weblog's column entitled, "Roundup, ready." This opinion column, an occasional feature from the weblog's writer, farmer and journalist Tom Philpott, includes critical coverage of the biotechnology giant.

Dear Mr. Philpott,

I am the trademark and copyright attorney for Monsanto Company, the owner of the Roundup Ready(R) trademark. The attached link is to the Bitter Greens Journal which features the name "Roundup, ready" as the title of one of its features. Roundup Ready(R) is a well known trademark which is registered by Monsanto not only in the United States, but in many countries throughout the word [sic]. As you have pointed out in the column, Roundup Ready(R) is famous in the agricultural industry.

While you have stated in your column that you chose the name "Roundup, ready" in honor of Monsanto's famed line of seeds, we must object to this use and request that you change the name for the following reasons:

1) You are using our trademark without our consent. This use of the term could cause your readers to think that your journal is in some way sponsored by Monsanto or that Monsanto supports the positions set out in your journal.

2) You are using our trademark in an incorrect manner (with a comma and in a way that genericizes the mark). This weakens our trademark rights.

I would appreciate your confirmation that you will change the name of this column and cease using "Roundup, ready" or any form of our trademark as the name of a feature or in an incorrect manner in your journal. We appreciate your cooperation in this matter.

http://bittergreensgazette.blogspot.com/

Very truly yours,

Barb

Barb Bunning-Stevens
Assistant General Counsel - Trademarks

I have no idea why Monsanto would want to encourage increased attention to a critic's coverage of its Roundup Ready products. Roundup Ready is a trademark for seeds that have been genetically modified to survive treatment with Monsanto's high-selling herbicide, Roundup. This herbicide actually has some environmental advantages by comparison to some of its competitors, but until Roundup Ready seeds came along, the herbicide also had the disadvantage of indiscriminately killing the field crops on which farmers might like to apply it. Even those of us with high hopes for new agricultural technologies as one possible approach to preventing worldwide hunger and agro-environmental decline couldn't help but be dismayed when the purpose of one of the most important early commercial successes for genetically modified crops was to permit greater sales of Monsanto herbicides!

Paradoxically, threats from Monsanto lawyers may draw yet more coverage of Monsanto's legal tactics and increase the number of places in the world wide web that provide links to this report on Monsanto's longstanding campaign of lawsuits against farmers. Can this really serve Monsanto's corporate interest?

As for the possibility of confusion between Philpott's weblog and Monsanto's trademark property, I don't believe a word of it. Or, at least, I won't believe a word of it until Philpott starts marketing seeds for his little-known genetically modified bitter greens. Where can I get me some of those?

Federal food assistance programs during the disaster

The Food Research and Action Center, a leading anti-hunger advocacy group at the federal level, has this report on USDA policies for the major food assistance programs.

USDA has responded quickly to the devastation left behind by Hurricane Katrina by issuing a comprehensive set of guidance and waivers designed to allow maximum use of the Child Nutrition Programs (school lunch, child and adult care food, and summer food to feed children in schools, shelters, child care centers, family child care homes, summer and afterschool programs.

USDA has eased program requirements that simply can not be met in the face of this disaster, including meal components, record keeping, and enrollment requirements (e.g., identification and income documentation). USDA’s WIC guidance is designed to help State WIC agencies restore or preserve the continued delivery of WIC benefits and to reach potentially newly eligible individuals affected by Hurricane Katrina.

USDA has issued policy guidance on Hurricane Katrina evacuees’ eligibility for food stamps, including how receiving states can process benefits for those who have relocated to their states. The policy defines refugees from areas devastated by Hurricane Katrina and distinguishes among procedures: for clients in states authorized to operate a disaster food stamp program; for those clients in states not authorized to operate a disaster program; and for clients currently certified. See USDA Food Stamp Program memorandum.

Katrina

Many of the webloggers in the sidebar have been helping to organize relief for victims of Katrina or share information about the tragedy. See, for example, What's in Rebecca's Pocket?, a poignant post in Asymmetrical Information, Life Begins at 30, an interesting post about Katrina wikis at Marginal Revolution, and many more. It still seems too early to begin to think about what the storm has in store for the national food economy. For a start, see NBC in Alabama on food prices, or Fast Food Facts on the restaurant industry. God bless the rescue and relief workers and sustain their strength and goodwill.

Welcome Fuddruckers customers!

This is funny. Due to some sort of computer glitch, visitors to the website www.fuddruckers.com this morning have been transferred to www.google.com. At Google, they naturally enter the search term "Fuddruckers," where they find U.S. Food Policy's coverage of Fuddruckers as one of the first ten search results. So dozens of people looking for information about Fuddruckers restaurants have been arriving here to read about U.S. food policy and economics from a public interest perspective.

Happy to oblige. Here is a reprint of our earlier post:

Under the category "viral," the Adrants weblog reports that Fuddruckers restaurant chain is behind a fake advertisement on the internet for a "beef relief patch." The ad's premise is that consumers need something like a nicotine patch to break their beef addiction or they will become irritable on their way to the nearest Fuddruckers restaurant for their fix. Adrants finds that the satire site is posted at the address http://www.beefrelief.com/ [link no longer working] and also on the website for the Austin-based agency Fosfurus [link no longer working]. The advertisement's nutritional sensitivity seems well calibrated with the Fuddruckers menu [link no longer working], emphasizing hamburgers ranging in weight from 1/3 pound to 1 pound. Naturally, like Quizno's and Applebee's, Fuddruckers hides its nutrition information from its customers. (If you are thinking to yourself, "we all know what a 1 pound hamburger contains," then -- without looking it up -- please post in the comments section your guess for calories and saturated fat as a percentage of the daily recommendation). The bottom of the menu page says: "Specific nutritional data on Fuddruckers menu items is not currently available." Nobody wants the government to regulate what these restaurants offer, but the economic case for better nutrition information than this is compelling, and the public deserves to know what these restaurants are selling.

American Dietetic Association (ADA) and dairy weight loss hype

The worst thing about the dairy weight loss hype is the role of organizations that are supposed to represent the public health and the public interest: the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the American Dietetic Association. The federally sponsored milk and dairy commodity promotion programs have continuted to push dairy weight loss advertisements that misrepresent the scientific evidence, selectively quoting from small studies from scientists with unusually strong financial interests and ignoring other studies that fail to support the claims.

USDA's Agricultural Marketing Service is required to make a report to Congress each July on the status of these dairy promotion programs. The 2005 report is still missing from the USDA/AMS website. The agency tells me they will send it when it is ready. The House Agriculture Committee staff tells me they hear there has been a "printing problem" and the report should be ready in a "few weeks." I suspect it will be difficult to write this report this year, because the advertising programs now have legal status as "government speech," confirmed by the U.S. Supreme Court in May. Federal government communication on diet and nutrition is supposed to be consistent with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The scientific committee behind these guidelines specifically considered and declined to endorse the dairy weight loss claims. Under these circumstances, what will the 2005 USDA report to Congress on dairy commodity promotion say about the tens of millions of dollars being spent on advertising dairy weight loss diets? Since the release date for the USDA report to Congress is July, and the holdup is a mere printing problem, it should be legal for anybody to send an electronic copy to U.S. Food Policy. I'd be delighted to receive it.

Similarly, despite my suggestions that it be removed or edited, the American Dietetic Association has left up its web page on dairy weight loss. The worst thing about this web page is that its lead paragraph exactly misrepresents the scientific evidence. Even in its most favorable light, the weight loss suggested by some small scientific studies occurs on diets with deep caloric restrictions. The ADA web page, by contrast, says the dairy weight loss approach "doesn't mean depriving yourself." The ADA sounds like a classic fad diet advertiser: "Have you vowed to lose weight this year? If so, listen up. There is a new approach to losing – one that doesn’t mean depriving yourself or following the latest fad diet." (When the advertiser says, "this is not a fad diet," it should remind you of the politician saying, "I am not a crook"). I admire the ADA, a leading advocate for good health and nutrition, and I simply cannot believe that this language is acceptable to the ADA's professional membership. If you are an ADA member, please contact your association.

The September edition of the Tufts Health and Nutrition Letter (new issue not yet online) reports on the scientific evidence:

The two published clinical trials most often cited by the dairy industry involved small sample sizes and, critics note, were funded by the dairy council or General Mills, which makes Yoplait yogurt. Michael B. Zemel, MD, director of the University of Tennessee's Nutrition Institute, led both studies and has since taken the unusual step of patenting his findings, so dairy companies must pay him to cite his studies in their ads.

Reading the fine print in those ads makes clearer what Dr. Zemel actually concluded, which is not simply that upping your dairy consumption will peel off the pounds.

Instead, the studies were among people who also ate much less food, with a daily deficit of 500 calories.

Similarly, David Schardt has a fine detailed report on the scientific aspects of this controversy in the latest issue of the Nutrition Action Healthletter from the Center for Science in the Public Interest (issue not online). An accompanying editorial from the Center's director, Michael Jacobson, points out the role of the federal government's commodity promotion programs, which has been emphasized in U.S. Food Policy:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture's Agricultural Marketing Service (AMS) is supposed to oversee the programs and make sure that the ads are not false or misleading. However, the AMS's standards are rather low. For example, the AMS says that if the ads make a claim about health, at least two published studies should support the claim.

This standard of two scientific articles is trivially easy to meet, far easier than a policy of being consistent with the Dietary Guidelines for Americans, which represents the balance of the best scientific evidence. If this "two-article" standard is for real, this policy completely overturns the promises that the Dietary Guidelines will be the federal government's 'one voice' on nutrition and health. See, for example, the promises in the testimony before Congress (.doc) from Eric Hentges, the former pork board vice president who now oversees dietary guidance for USDA as director of the Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion.

Katrina

Our thoughts are with the folks in Louisiana and Mississippi. Accidental Hedonist offers the list of resources for donations below, and checks in with a food blogger from New Orleans. The Washington Post covers disruptions to freight supply lines, including the likely effect on food prices. The food museum blog has a post about efforts to provide food and water more immediately: no water, no food.

America's Second Harvest Phone:312-263-2303 ext. 147

American Disaster Reserve Phone: 804-287-1246

American Red Cross Phone" (202) 303-8635