TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/071591/0715132.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 9.5 KB | 192 lines

                                                                                HEALTH, Page 57

COVER STORIES

Playing Politics with Our Food


While the Food and Drug Administration reforms labels, the
Agriculture Department drags its feet, thanks to its cozy
relations with the meat industry

By ANASTASIA TOUFEXIS -- Reported by Dick Thompson/Washington,
with other bureaus


    "A Tower of Babel" is what Health and Human Services
Secretary Dr. Louis Sullivan calls the din surrounding U.S. food
products. But if Americans are having trouble deciphering the
language in food labels and advertising, just who or what is to
blame? The food industry likes to point the finger at the
Federal Government's regulatory swamp, while the government puts
the onus on overzealous marketers. But in truth there is enough
culpability for all. For years now, foodmakers and government
regulators have been tangled up together in a web of sloppy
practices and, above all, cozy politics. "Everything in
nutrition is political," declares Marion Nestle, who chairs the
department of nutrition at New York University.

    Part of the grocery garble stems from America's hodgepodge
system of food regulation. Three federal agencies have
jurisdiction. The FDA oversees all items sold in supermarkets
except for meat, poultry and any products that are more than 2%
meat. These products are monitored instead by the U.S.
Department of Agriculture. Food advertising, meanwhile, falls
within the bailiwick of the Federal Trade Commission. To see how
muddled it gets, consider the case of frozen pizza. Cheese pizza
and its packaging belongs to the FDA, while pepperoni pizza and
its labeling rests with the USDA. The FTC approves ads for both.
Contributing to the chaos: the agencies often don't use the same
rules, standards or even definitions in regulating food.

    The influence of politics on food policy is most clearly
visible at the Agriculture Department. Written into its charter
is a conflict of interest wider than a side of beef. Unlike its
sister regulatory agencies, the USDA is obliged to promote as
well as police agricultural products. Nutritionists are quick
to point out that the department is responsible for regulating
most of the fattier -- unhealthier -- elements of the diet. But
its mandate to promote the consumption of beef, pork, dairy
products and eggs gets in the way of its concerns for American
health. "There's no David Kessler heading the USDA, and there
never will be," says Bonnie Liebman, chief nutritionist at the
Center for Science in the Public Interest.

    Instead there is Agriculture Secretary Edward Madigan, a
former Congressman from the Illinois farm belt, whose commitment
to food producers was clear almost as soon as he took office
last March.

    The most glaring example of this bias involves a foiled
attempt to revise the USDA's dietary guidelines. In 1958 the
department introduced its "basic four" food-group chart, which
divided food into four major categories: milk, meat, vegetables
and fruits, and bread and cereals. The groups were quickly
branded into the brain of every American schoolchild as of equal
importance.

    But as research into heart disease, cancer and nutrition
proceeded over the past 35 years, the chart emerged as seriously
misleading, more of a political construct than a guide to
healthy eating. It overemphasizes meat and milk -- a credit to
the influence of those industries, whose lobbyists have been
active and generous in Washington.

    To better reflect current nutritional knowledge, the USDA
began redrawing the chart three years ago. The result: the
"eating-right pyramid." While the new guide keeps the basic four
food groups, it dramatically shifts the dietary balance. Cereals
and grains, fruits and vegetables are stressed by being placed
in the broad lower area of the pyramid; meat and dairy products
occupy a narrower upper portion; and fats and sweets are
consigned to the "use sparingly" tip.

    Unhappy with the new geometry, the meat and dairy
industries began pressuring Secretary Madigan to prevent the
pyramid from being publicly disseminated. One month after he
took office, just as the pyramid was going to press, Madigan
caved in. His rationale: the new chart needed more study,
specifically concerning children and low-income Americans. Never
mind that it had already undergone extensive consumer tests and
review by 30 government and university experts.

    Consumer activists cite other instances that expose the
USDA as industry's captive. New York University's Nestle
relates how the department pressed for changes in the language
of the 1988 Surgeon General's Report on Nutrition and Health,
which she helped write. "It was very clear to me that the report
was not going to say `eat less meat.' " In fact, when the
report came out in 1989, it advised the public only to "choose
lean meats."

    The Department of Agriculture is also resisting some of
the labeling reforms being pushed by the Food and Drug
Administration. For instance, the FDA is insisting that
manufacturers base their package labels and health claims on
realistic-size servings, instead of impossibly small portions.
But when it comes to some meat products, the USDA favors a
serving size of just 1 oz., which would enable packagers to make
low-fat claims. For the unwary shopper, the result could be that
a can of USDA-regulated beef soup might falsely appear to have
less fat than a can of FDA-regulated vegetable soup.

    The Agriculture Department also prefers a looser
definition of "low fat" than the one favored by the FDA. The
tough FDA standard, charges Gary Wilson of the National
Cattlemen's Association, would mean that "you won't have any
meat items being able to meet the criteria." Such an impossible
standard would destroy the incentive for the meat industry to
produce reduced-fat beef and pork, says Wilson, and the USDA is
inclined to agree. The American Heart Association plans to lobby
Congress if the USDA regulations don't match the FDA's.

    Beef-industry beefs aside, most food packagers have been
surprisingly supportive of the Federal Government efforts to
reform labeling. The reason is that the deregulation of the
1980s backfired. During that decade, when President Reagan
endeavored to get government off the back of business, federal
food watchdogs went off-duty. Since this was also an era of
national obsession with health, the hottest-growing segments of
the food market were "the light and leans, low fats, the healthy
choice," says Grocery Manufacturers of America vice president
Jeffrey Nedelman. In that atmosphere of lax regulation and lite
mentality, health claims proliferated like sprouts on a salad.

    Industry and government grew cozier. A watershed occurred
in 1984 when Kellogg's introduced a new marketing campaign for
its All-Bran cereal. The company actually got the National
Cancer Institute to agree to put a message on its package
stating that diets high in fiber (and low in fat) may reduce
one's risk of cancer. The FDA was horrified by this implied
product endorsement. Under FDA rules, any product marketed with
a claim that it prevents disease is subject to testing for
safety and efficacy as a drug. "We wanted to go out and seize
that product," says the FDA's Edward Scarbrough. But the agency
was reined in by Reagan appointees. Sales of All Bran soared,
and so did health claims for all foods.

    Before long, food slogans were so out of hand that
individual state regulators felt compelled to step in. Attorneys
from nine states, including New York, California, Texas and
Florida, formed a task force that became known as the "food
police." They brought dozens of suits against manufacturers for
misleading labels and ads, levied fines and seized goods. When
California passed a law in 1986 requiring all consumer-product
labels to identify pesticides and cancer-causing ingredients,
the food industry saw a threat to the fundamental principle of
mass marketing. Looming before it was the nightmarish
possibility that each state would develop its own labeling
guidelines. In that case, an item like gummi bears might need
50 different labels.

    Suddenly, the gospel of deregulation lost its allure, and
the idea of uniform national standards came to be regarded as
a form of salvation. "We want national guidelines that preclude
any state attorney general from making issues out of things said
on packaging," says Stuart Greenblatt, a spokesman for Keebler
Co., an Elmhurst, Ill., cookiemaker. "The food industry believes
there ought to be one national rule," affirms Peter Barton Hutt,
a former chief general counsel for the FDA who has advised the
Grocery Manufacturers association.

    Industry had hoped the Administration would straighten out
the mess, but the Bush White House was slow to undo the Reagan
revolution. Instead, Congress, prodded by a coalition of 25
consumer and medical organizations, came up with the 1990
Nutrition Labeling and Education Act. Faced with a clearly
popular bill, the President felt compelled to go along.

    The new law, enthusiastically embraced by David Kessler's
FDA, will not necessarily answer every consumer's prayers. As
USDA foot dragging proves, it will not be easy to achieve one
universal set of regulations for all food. Some consumer groups
argue that the only way to achieve that goal is to put the FDA
in charge of regulating the entire grocery basket. Politically
speaking, however, that's about as likely as a fat-free pork
chop.