BETWEEN THE LINES Q&A with Kelly Brownell

Between the Lines Q&A

A weekly column featuring progressive viewpoints
on national and international issues
under-reported in mainstream media
for release Aug. 14, 2009

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Public Policy Should be Employed
to Combat Rise in Obesity

RealAudio

MP3

Interview with Kelly Brownell,
founding director of the Rudd Center
for Food Policy and Obesity,
conducted by Melinda Tuhus

obesity

A recent report shows that the cost of treating obesity has doubled in the past 10 years, and that obese people spent 42 percent more on medical costs in 2006 than people of normal weight. As the debate on health care reform heats up, this is one area where policymakers are looking to reduce costs through prevention programs. But the problem is complex, involving lifestyle, economics, psychology and the outsize impact of the food industry and its marketing arm.

Giant food corporations market their products to children and teenagers, spending over $1.6 billion annually in advertising. The overwhelming majority of these ads, now targeting schools, the Internet, and mobile phones, are for unhealthy snack foods, high in calories, sugar, fat, and/or sodium.

Between The Lines' Melinda Tuhus spoke with Kelly Brownell, founding director of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University in New Haven, Conn. He says blaming or shaming people for their weight problems is counter-productive and suggests several public policy changes that could help prevent and reduce obesity and its corresponding personal and social costs.

KELLY BROWNELL: When one looks at all the contributors to obesity, you have a list a mile long: increasing portion sizes, physical activity being subtracted out of schools; value meal-type pricing that encourages people to buy lots of unhealthy foods; food marketing directed at children. We could spend two hours going through the list of contributors. The food industry uses this to support their position, "Why pick on us? Why we should change, because there are so many things going on." That sort of philosophy basically paralyzes you from doing anything, because why do A when B might be the big driver, or C or D. It makes sense to get rid of that philosophy and think more broadly about some of the obvious contributors. First, the price of food is an obvious contributor. It's just simply true that it costs more to buy good food than unhealthy food, and that's especially true if you're poor and live in certain neighborhoods and don't have access to a lot of things like fresh fruits and vegetables.

It's also the case that food marketing is a huge issue. It's like tidal wave enveloping the nation, and by educating people is like giving people swimming lessons while the tidal wave is coming in. You just simply can't do it. A few people might be able to swim in those conditions, but most won't, and that's what's happening now.

You asked specifically about the issue of food taxes. There's a wonderful precedent with tobacco: The single most effective thing ever done to stem the tide of smoking in this country was to raise prices through taxes, and the economists have shown that through study after study. So, we believe that same principle should apply to food, so we've proposed, in particular, a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages. We've proposed a penny an ounce tax, with the money to be raised to be used for nutrition-related programs. We think that's a winning idea because there's clear science on sugar-sweetened beverages showing they're contributing to diseases like obesity and diabetes - stronger science than there is for any other category of foods. Some other categories are close behind and the science is building, but it's rock-solid in the area of sugar-sweetened beverages. And so a tax like that, especially if the money raised from it would be used wisely, could be a public health home run, and given the tobacco precedent, makes all the sense in the world. BETWEEN THE LINES: So, do you feel like the climate is right for some significant changes, and any other pieces that you feel are sort of ready to pop?

KELLY BROWNELL: I see very good news on the horizon, and partly it's because of the signs that the American public cares more about the quality of food than the quantity. It used to be the case that Americans just wanted more food for less money, so they'd pile it on and get these enormous helpings at restaurants, etc. There's still some of that, to be sure, but Americans care more about the story of their food - they want to know where it came from, who grew it, how far it was shipped, even to some extent the impact on the environment of different food choices they make. That's all very good and I think it bodes quite well for the future. And authors like Michael Pollan have become quite popular; chefs like Alice Waters have become quite visible, and I think that's all for the good.

At the moment, there are a lot of groups working on this issue [but] they tend not to be working in a coordinated way, so you have groups interested in hunger, for example, others interested in obesity, others interested in sustainability and the impact of food choices on the environment. I believe if all these groups could come together and work on a common set of themes, it could be a very powerful movement and push ahead the public policy agenda even more quickly than it would be otherwise.

BETWEEN THE LINES: So, in terms of food marketing, I believe there are restrictions on TV advertising of certain items to kids...there's not?

KELLY BROWNELL: No, basically food marketing is a free-for-all. There are almost no restrictions on the food industry -- even self-imposed restrictions -- on who they can advertise to, what they can advertise and how they advertise it. And as a consequence, there's an overwhelming bad message that's being delivered, especially to children. The marketing used to be pretty simple -- when I was a boy, for example, there were Saturday morning cartoons, there were ads for sugared cereal and that was about all you saw.

But now it's everywhere -- it's product placements, and people don't recognize it as advertising. Product placements are in movies, and a new and very difficult to monitor problem is digital marketing -- marketing on the Internet in particular. So the cereal companies, the candy companies, they all have websites where children can go and play these interactive games. And it's a very cost-efficient way to market because the industry has a one-time cost to build the website and then millions of people could visit it and it doesn't cost them anymore to run it. Compared to a food ad where people watch it for 15 or 30 seconds on television, it's a big expense for the industry, and then the impact is gone. We and others have found that when children go on these websites, they're there for an average of 20 minutes or so. The whole marketing landscape is changing. Soon, because there are GPS chips in cell phones, people -- kids included -- will start to get food ads directed to their location. So they'll get off school, power up their cell phone, and get an ad that says something like, "Are you hungry? There's a donut shop two blocks on your right. Here's 50 cents off a dozen" or something.

These things are end runs around parents. Parents used to have trouble monitoring children's exposure to this, but now it's nearly impossible. There's a clear role for government to step in and do something about this, so one major policy change has to be to limit the amount of marketing of unhealthy food directly to children.

Contact the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at (203) 432-6690 or visit their website at www.yaleruddcenter.org

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Melinda Tuhus is a producer of Between The Lines, which can be heard on more than 45 radio stations and in RealAudio and MP3 on our website at http://www.btlonline.org. This interview excerpt was featured on the award-winning, syndicated weekly radio newsmagazine, Between The Lines for the week ending Aug. 21, 2009. This Between The Lines Q&A was compiled by Melinda Tuhus and Anna Manzo.

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