Yes.
Personal responsibility is key to effort that promotes livable diets.
By Jeff Stier
In the year since Michelle Obama launched her campaign against obesity, she’s drawn increasing criticism from left and right. While some complaints have merits on the margins, the first lady’s efforts have been mostly reasonable and well-grounded.
From the right, critics argue she has gone too far. Food industry pundit Jim Prevor argues that the first lady’s advocacy differs qualitatively from that of earlier first ladies. Nancy Reagan’s “Just Say No” campaign and Laura Bush’s reading initiative promoted existing federal policy. But Obama’s initiative includes “advocacy of policies that have never been endorsed by the democratic process,” Prevor observes, citing her advocacy for legislation such as the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act.
In fact, a large part of the first lady’s campaign is centered on balanced diets, individual responsibility and limited rather than expansive government.
Consider Rush Limbaugh’s tirade about the first lady taking her daughters for high-calorie ribs during a ski trip to Vail. This is not hypocrisy, as Limbaugh argued. Rather, Obama showed Americans that you can be committed to a healthy diet and active lifestyle while still occasionally enjoying a fun meal. It would only have been hypocritical if the first lady had been telling Americans never to indulge. But that hasn’t been her approach.
Instead, the right’s indignation should be redirected to more insidious “solutions” to the obesity problem being promoted by much of the so-called public health community, which is dominated by people who adhere to a broader ideology. The big-government approaches are not consistent with a capitalist society, discount the importance of personal responsibility and aren’t likely to be effective.
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was the first big-city mayor to require chain restaurants to post calorie counts on menus. The federal government followed, including a similar provision in the health care legislation. But scientific studies have found the intrusive requirements don’t influence our decisions about what to order.
Does that mean advocates for shrinking waistlines are calling for a reversal of the ineffective policy? Did they stop advocating for government interference with interactions between legal businesses and consumers?
Of course not. The author of one recent study that showed that kids aren’t influenced by mandatory calorie counts on menu boards on behalf of nanny-staters everywhere told Reuters, “It means we’re going to have to rethink what other sorts of interventions might be more effective.”
Some advocates are calling for the government to restrict advertising to children. And San Francisco’s ban on McDonald’s Happy Meals was a major slide down the slippery slope of treating food like tobacco by restricting marketing to children. But as the first lady would certainly agree, food and tobacco have almost nothing in common.
Some activists see industry as the enemy. But instead of threatening industry, Obama understands that in our free society it is appropriate for her to offer a carrot rather than threaten with a stick.
And indeed, retailers are offering healthier fare — for a profit, of course. As a Burger King executive once said, “We are in the business of selling people the food they want to eat.” Until the left embraces this concept, they will continue to wrongly believe that “profit” is a four-letter word. Wisely, the first lady hasn’t gone down that path. Instead, she argues for — and, more important perhaps, leads by example — promoting moderate, livable diets and an active lifestyle.
Jeff Stier is a senior fellow at the National Center for Public Policy Research, a conservative think tank in Washington.
No.
Politics weighs down effort as businesses hold on to some influence.
By Michele Simon
The one-year anniversary of the first lady’s Let’s Move campaign to “end childhood obesity within a generation” was marked by celebratory speeches and fanfare — much of it generated by the White House itself.
It’s certainly true that Michelle Obama has been tremendously successful in summoning both the resources of her office as well as her own positive energy and enthusiasm to get the nation to focus its attention on this important problem.
She also deserves credit for specific gains made in the past year, including championing school food and shining a light on the serious problem of “food deserts,” neighborhoods that lack even a basic grocery store, let alone a farmers’ market.
However, her highly touted “Let’s Move” campaign can make no claims of progress in combating the 800-pound gorilla in America’s dining rooms: Junk food marketing to children.
While Obama may have elevated the national conversation about childhood obesity, that discourse has actually been going on for almost a decade now.
In 2006, a damning report from the Institute of Medicine on food marketing to kids called upon Congress to act within two years if industry made no significant improvements on its own.
In the wake of that threat, food companies made many promises to clean up their act; commitments were announced, self-regulatory bodies were formed. It all sounded very impressive.
And yet recent reports coming out of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale University as well as the government’s own Federal Trade Commission, continue to document ubiquitous junk food and fast-food marketing to children.
Just take a stroll down the cereal aisle, and you can find such childhood obesity-inducing products as Cupcake Cereal and Cookie Crisp Sprinkles Cereal. Even Cheerios now comes in a chocolate variety. And these days, the ads aren’t just on TV. Our digital world contains endless marketing opportunities designed to reach kids wherever parents are not.
The first lady does mention this problem in her speeches, but her campaign is unable to tackle the issue directly, not only because Obama has no policymaking powers but because to do so means threatening her husband’s business-friendly image.
A sure sign of how small a threat “Let’s Move” is to the food industry is just how eager companies have been to jump onto its bandwagon.
Most successful was Wal-Mart, which recently gained Obama’s endorsement of the company’s 5-year plan to improve the quality of its foods. Merits of the announcement aside, particularly troubling was that the first lady’s staff had been meeting in secret with Wal-Mart executives for months, negotiating the final — albeit vague terms of the plan.
The real question may not be if “Let’s Move” is going far enough, but what role is it playing in our national agenda on solving childhood obesity?
Negotiated deals with the likes of Wal-Mart cannot become a substitute for actual policymaking. As messy and as imperfect as the democratic process is, it needs to be based on serious policy — not public relations gestures — to work well.
Instead of meaningful government actions, we have only “Let’s Move” and more voluntary industry promises.
Solving the complex problems of childhood obesity won’t be solved with cute slogans or deal-making with the likes of Wal-Mart. To win this battle, we need our political leaders to take on seriously the politics of marketing junk-food to our children.
Michele Simon is a public health attorney and author of “Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines Our Health and How to Fight Back.”
