Health
Denny's Going the Way of Philip Morris
Published July 27, 2009 @ 10:28AM PT
Ali Savino runs the food site www.GastroNomalies.com.
Late last week, Center for Science in the Public Interest announced they were filing a lawsuit against Denny's on behalf of a New Jersey man. The suit alleges that Denny's endangered its customers by not disclosing the astronomically high amount of sodium in their food:
The suit contends that many of the meals at Denny’s contain more in the one meal than is recommended for an entire day. An example is Denny’s double cheeseburger which contains 3,880 milligrams. The lawsuit is asking the court to order to order Denny's to list the sodium content of its food on the menu.
Another meal heavy in sodium is the Meat Lover's Scramble which contains 5,690 milligrams. This meal includes eggs scrambled with cheese,, bacon, diced ham and sausage that comes with more meat on the side plus hash browns and pancakes.
The recommended daily allowance of sodium is 2300 milligrams. For those at risk of heart disease and hypertension, the acceptable level drops to 1500 milligrams. The Meat Lover's Scramble has 2 and 1/2 days worth of sodium in one sitting. Of course, Denny's is taking one out of the McDonald's playbook, calling the suit ridiculous and frivolous. McDonald's has been sued more than once going back as far as 10 years for causing health problems in their diners, and so far McDonald's has managed to win in the courts:
NEW YORK (CNN) - A lawsuit alleging food from McDonald's restaurants is responsible for making people obese got thrown out by a federal judge Wednesday.
The landmark legal action was the first of its kind against a fast-food chain to make its way into a U.S. courtroom.
McDonald's spokesman Walt Riker said that common sense had prevailed in the suit. "We said from the beginning that this was a frivolous lawsuit. Today's ruling confirms that fact."
The Denny's lawsuit will be a very hard case to make. However, as the Obama campaign has shown, its important to take a long ball strategy to public perception. The long history of tobacco litigation is instructive here.
The first tobacco lawsuits were filed in the 1950s, but almost always failed. The tobacco companies argued that the harmful effects of smoking had been recognized for decades; people choose to smoke and so are personally responsible if they suffer ill effects. Slate: A Tobacco Lawsuit Primer (April 25, 2000)
In the late 1990s, plaintiffs began introducing scientific documentation of the chemical dependency generated by smoking—and proof that the tobacco companies were well aware of its addictive properties. Slate: A Tobacco Lawsuit Primer (April 25, 2000) The first successful tobacco lawsuit was awarded in February 2000, when a California jury ordered Philip Morris to pay $51.5 million to a California smoker with inoperable lung cancer. Slate: A Tobacco Lawsuit Primer (April 25, 2000)
Politicians vs. Leaders
Published July 22, 2009 @ 02:35PM PT
This week, Steph continues her series on a critical piece of social infrastructure necessary for growing the small-scale farming sector, or any other part of a more localized economy that depends on small businesses: making a public health insurance option available to everyone.
When President Obama was elected, it seemed like everyone was quoting Abraham Lincoln. When I saw this quote today, though, it got me thinking about the current status of the health care reform debate:
A statesman is he who thinks in the future generations, and a politician is he who thinks in the upcoming elections. – Abraham Lincoln
It reminded me of another saying, though I can’t find who said it so maybe I’m making it up – A politician does what is popular, whereas a leader does what’s right.
In either case, the health care debate is separating Congress into statesmen and politicians, with politicians like South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint who is trying to block all health care reform in order to settle mere political quarrels on one side, and leaders like Reps. Ron Kind and Earl Pomeroy fighting to make the lives of their constituents better on the other side.
Both Reps. Kind and Pomeroy are rural Democrats, and yet they were two of the three members of the House Ways and Means Committee (one of the committees that is charged with writing the bill in the House) who voted against party lines and against the bill. Voting against their party is a mighty unpopular thing to do, but it was right to stand up for the rural communities they represent.
Rep. Kind said that he voted against the bill in part because it tied reimbursement rates for the public health insurance option to Medicare rates, which are problematically low in rural areas and providers are reimbursed for the volume of care they provide (which will inevitably be lower in rural areas due to population density). At the same time as he voted against a bill he felt would hurt his constituents, he reiterated his support for a public health insurance option.
Rep. Pomeroy also voted against the bill for similar reasons, saying that tying payment schedules of the public health insurance option to Medicare is a deal breaker for him and that the bill in its current form did not do enough for rural health care.
If you believe the reports that Mr. Obama’s poll numbers on health care are slipping, maybe it is because the President has not been as strong a leader as he could be. Reps. Kind and Pomeroy are standing up for rural America and leading the charge for health reform that works for all of us regardless of geography.
This evening at 8pm Central time, President Obama will discuss health care reform in a prime time news conference. I hope Mr. Obama’s inner statesman – and not his inner politician – is the one who shows up tonight.
Bill Establishes Farm-to-School Program in Texas
Published July 15, 2009 @ 09:56AM PT
Hello Sustainable Food people, remember me? I'll be doing my best to help Melissa with content for this blog while Natasha is away. Looking forward to getting back into the farm and food discussion over the next couple weeks.)
Last month, Texas Senate Bill 1027 passed through the state's Legislature and was signed into law by Governor Rick Perry on June 19, 2009. The bill, sponsored by state Senator Kirk Watson, provides for the establishment of an inter-agency farm-to-school coordination task force in order to increase the ability of schools in the state to purchase locally produced foods to feed students.
First off, yay! I'm happy to see that government officials in Texas are taking a proactive role in increasing the amount of healthy foods available to state schools.
With the recent documentation that a full 20 percent of pre-schoolers in the U.S. are obese (yes, not just overweight, but obese), this legislation could not come at a better time.
Among the various tasks the bill requires the task force to accomplish (with my comments italicized):
- Offer assistance in identifying funding sources and grants that allow schools and school districts to recover the costs associated with purchasing locally grown food products. (I can't tell you how important this provision is. The greatest barrier to getting more fresh and local food into schools is cost, and if government can help defray that cost, schools will be much more willing to shell out the extra money for fresh food.)
- Provide technical assistance to school food service agencies to establish procedures, recipes, menu rotations, and other internal processes that accommodate the use of locally grown foods in public schools. (It's easy to throw a bunch of frozen french fries in the deep frier, but it's quite another to figure out how to incorporate beets, leeks and other fresh veggies into meals--and get kids to actually eat them.)
- Identify, design, or make available training programs to enable local farmers and ranchers to market their products to schools and school districts. (Making it easier, and of course profitable, for farmers to sell their products to schools helps to remove another barrier in making more locally produced good available.)
Second, I'm even more pleased to see the emphasis the legislation places on nutritional and experiential food education. More than simply making it easier for schools to source locally grown food, the task force is designed to encourage kids to learn to appreciate and understand the value of diets that include lots of fresh fruits and vegetables.
The earlier you teach children about the joys of enjoying fresh food, the more likely they'll take these eating habits with them as they grow older.
It won't be until the winter of 2010 until this task force is actually set up and ready to make recommendations on how to increase local foods in schools. As we've seen before, just because a government program is set up, it does not mean it's going to be effective.
I'm hoping that this task force will keep in mind the health and well-being of the state's children as they're working toward a stronger statewide food system.
(Photo credit: Bonzo McGrue on Flickr)
Living the Animal Life
Published July 14, 2009 @ 10:17AM PT
There's a bill that's been introduced in Congress that would put sharp limits on Confined Animal Feeding Operations, and Obama supports it. I'm fairly amazed and impressed, which I was getting worried that I'd gotten to cynical to even be.
It won't pass. Even that's okay I suppose, considering how the discussion is off to such a good start.
The bill is Rep. Louise Slaughter's (D-NY) offering to ban non-medicinal, preemptive use of antibiotics in livestock.
In large part, as the article notes, these are used to promote growth. However, it's the barely mentioned "prevent illnesses" part that's of most concern. Eddie Gehman Kohn talks here about the way this practice is turning antibiotics into worthless candy by spurring the rise of antibiotic-resistant bacterial strains, but that's still a side effect - though a powerful and frightening one. The main point of these drugs is to prevent animals that are raised in utterly vile conditions from simply keeling over dead before they can be slaughtered.
If you couldn't prevent the conditions of feedlot life itself from killing cattle, they'd have to be raised in lower concentrations, under cleaner conditions, and given a much healthier diet out of sheer necessity.
As it is now, most cattle are raised in lots packed deep with nothing but each other's waste. The health hazards of this are, one would think, obvious.
They're fed a grain diet, now that it's no longer allowed to feed these obligate herbivores ground up bones and scrap from other cattle, which is like feeding a human an all-Twinkie diet. They get permanent acidosis, roughly equivalent to a terrible case of chronic ulcers, and the bacteria from their guts are able to escape to infect the rest of their bodies. This commonly leaves their livers abcessed and scarred, not entirely unlike what would happen in a human with advanced cirrhosis of the liver.
Imagine humans kept wading in sh*t all day, force-fed to the point of severe obesity, suffering all the while from ulcers and cirrhosis. Those people's immune systems would be extremely compromised. They would need constant doses of antibiotics just to stay alive.
I don't make this comparison to say that animals should be treated like humans, but that they should be treated like animals.
They should be let out on real grass, on well-managed pasture where their numbers are just right to stimulate and fertilize the growth of a healthy prairie. They should be able to move around in the open air, where their immune systems will be supported by a proper diet and exercise, be part of an ecosystem that's very close to a naturally evolved grassland, have a quick death-by-predator (if we insist on being their only predators, we should do it right and be merciful) and the remains returned to the ground for the plants to eat.
This is what they're for. If we are to be sensible managers of the Earth's resources, getting this right is crucial to preserving what's going to be left over when the planet's freshwater and topsoil reserves can no longer handle the levels of grain production asked of them now. Getting this right is crucial to having livestock be a source of health instead of disease.
Nation's Food Policy Pro-Pus, Pro-E. Coli, Pro-Bribery, Pro-GMOs
Published July 10, 2009 @ 05:19PM PT
Practices that were infuriating to me under Republicans have simply become disheartening under Democrats. I will explain.
Pro-Pus
So Michael Taylor, Monsanto's former lawyer and a fan of adding extra pus to the nation's milk supply by way of giving all our dairy cows chronic mastitis from rBST/rBGH, has indeed been hired to the newly created position of Deputy Commissioner of Food with the Food Safety Working Group at the FDA.
In theory, Taylor might not be as bad as all that, he shilled for rBST as a young, impressionable executive and he seems to have grown as a person.
Though adding insult to injury, Pennsylvania's Dennis Wolff is a finalist for Undersecretary of Food Safety. A willing and enthusiastic participant in Monsanto's campaign to prevent rBST-free labeling on milk, Wolff tried to sneak a 2008 ban on the labels under the noses of Pennsylvania citizens who were outraged and forced the governor to overturn the policy.
But really, two, TWO people appointed or being considered to head food safety in the Obama administration who opposed the public's right to know when their milk came from cows being treated with a hormone that gives them chronically inflamed and infected udders!?
(BTW, people would have heard about the bovine growth hormone controversy more widely as of the year 2000, perhaps, if Monsanto hadn't instigated the firing of two journalists who tried to expose rBST/rBGH for the carcinogenic, bovine mastitis-causing health disaster that it is. Though also, and this is funny, ha-ha, as part of the resolution of the ensuing litigation, a judge ruled that it wasn't illegal for a news station to lie. F*ers!)
So, I think we can safely say that there are those in our national food safety leadership who don't consider pus a worrying contaminant in the milk supply. Even if they don't hire Wolff, that this didn't immediately disqualify him, that they'd consider adding to the shame of hiring Taylor, is a mark of some serious concern.
Pro-E. coli
As reported, again at ObamaFoodorama, this is another of goals of the Obama administration's food policy:
Inventing Controversy
Published July 10, 2009 @ 11:34AM PT
There's nothing the media loves more than a good horse race. A little controversy - or a lot of it - sparks readers' interest and drives up sales. In the absence of actual controversy, though, the media sometimes has to invent some.
The debate over health care reform is a great example.
72% of Americans support a public health insurance option that competes with private insurers, according to a recent poll done by New York Times/CBS News. The poll was taken in mid-June and showed that people of all political stripes support health reform that, in the words of President Obama, "keep[s] insurance companies honest." Almost half of people identifying as Republicans supported the idea of a public health insurance option, as well as over 70% of independents and nearly 90% of Democrats.
Another recent survey of small business owners in Nebraska and Iowa found strikingly similar numbers. Done by the Small Business Majority, 69% of Iowa small business owners and 70% of Nebraska small business owners support the choice of a private or public health insurance plan.
I would hardly call this controversy.
It appears that the Democratic leadership in the Senate, where it's likely much of this debate will take place, is beginning to think that those numbers don't really constitute much controversy either. In an article from the newspaper Roll Call, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) told Finance Chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) that he should stop trying to put forward a bill that doesn't include a public health insurance option or that taxes health benefits, because doing so could lose the votes of 10 to 15 Senate Democrats.
So why, then, is there the appearance of controversy? Ezra Klein puts it well:
Every interview with members of the administration involved in health-care reform goes the same way: A reporter asks if they support the public plan. They do. Then the intrepid reporters asks if it's non-negotiable. And, like everything else in health-care reform "except for success," the public plan turns out to be negotiable. And that's the headline.
In the U.S. Senate, however, there seems to be actual controversy over whether the average American should have the choice of a public health insurance plan. When asked about the New York Times/CBS News poll showing such overwhelming support of a public health insurance option, Senator Kent Conrad (D-ND) quipped, "Poll numbers, as you know, are here today and gone tomorrow. What's going to decide what passes here are votes [of Senators]."
One only needs to follow the money to see where the appearance of controversy in the Senate might be coming from - the $1.4 million dollars per day that the health care industry is spending on lobbying Congress. And it's not enough to have just anyone lobbying for the industry on Capitol Hill - the Washington Post reports:
The nation's largest insurers, hospitals and medical groups have hired more than 350 former government staff members and retired members of Congress in hopes of influencing their old bosses and colleagues, according to an analysis of lobbying disclosures and other records...Nearly half of the insiders previously worked for the key committees and lawmakers, including Sens. Max Baucus (D-Mont.) and Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa)...At least 10 others have been members of Congress, such as former House majority leaders Richard K. Armey (R-Tex.) and Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.)
When a legislator is hearing from scores more well-heeled and well-funded lobbyists than constituents, they may start to think that there is controversy where there largely isn't.
That's why your members of Congress need to hear from you. Right now.
You are the expert in the reasons why you need affordable health insurance, your community needs access to quality medical care, and why a public health insurance option creates competition that will help keep the health insurance companies from exploiting the elderly, the sick, and the self-employed.
Even if you've called before, even if your members of Congress have spoken in support of a public health insurance option before, they need to hear it again. We need to remind members of Congress what rural Americans need. Hearing from you helps them do the right thing and stand up against health industry lobbyists.
We may not have millions of dollars, but rural Americans know how to make a racket. Let's remind Congress who they represent and what we need: Health reform that works for all of us.
Coming Back to Food
Published July 09, 2009 @ 02:02PM PT
[Hello, folks, Natasha here. I'm getting married in about a week and a half, then honeymooning, and Melissa has been kind enough to agree to guest host full-time for the last half of July, easing into things over the course of the following week. It's my pleasure to be leaving you in her capable hands. Welcome, Melissa!]
I am excited to join Natasha here at Change.org to explore sustainable food issues during July.
For me, I've come back to food as an important issue after spending several years living off junk food with farmers markets peppered here and there. I am lucky that within my close circle of friends, I have friends working on several avenues of food-- from having their own organic farm, to adding local foods to their bagel shop, and even working on food policy in New York City.
As a little kid, I was fascinated with plants and food. I remember growing pumpkins in kindergarten, starting lettuce seeds on a sponge for a science project in second grade, and the sheer amazement of seeing a watermelon plant growing out a sink in seventh grade a few months after some seeds ended up in the trap.
As a college student, I was angered to learn that not everyone has access to healthy foods. I did not understand why there were not any real grocery stores covering most of Newark, NJ, or why Philadelphians didn't have grocery stores evenly spaced out across the city. I did not understand why farmers are given subsidies to grow corn while small, local farms have a hard time making it work.
Now, I am figuring out how to incorporate food advocacy into my everyday life. I've started an organic garden at my mom's house. There is almost nothing better than walking around barefoot, pulling weeds, and then eating the veggies I grew! I've also started to read more about food writ large, and I've started to talk with the leaders in the local foods movements, here and elsewhere.
I hope to share with y'all what I am learning. I hope to ask phenomenal questions and get incredible answers.
And, I hope we get offline more, outside more, and enjoy the beauty of a summer squash.
(Photo credit: j.e.n.n.y. on Flickr.)
