by Sue Kedgley
It’s hard to believe, but this is true. Food corporations no longer have to spend millions lobbying for favourable government policy in the United Kingdom. Instead, they have been invited by the new Conservative government to actually write the policy!
The new Health secretary, Andrew Lansley, has invited some of the biggest food corporations in the United Kingdom –McDonalds, KFC, PepsiCo, Mars and Kelloggs and supermarkets like Tesco–to help him develop the new government’s policy to tackle obesity, diet-related disease, and alcohol abuse.
Five ‘responsibility deal’ networks with business have been set up, co-chaired by Ministers, to come up with policies that will use voluntary approaches to improve public health, and will focus on persuading –or ‘nudging’—people to make healthier choices without force or regulation.
These new partnerships between business and government will form the basis of the new government’s public health strategy to help people make better health choices through voluntary measures and market incentives. The policy will be announced shortly in a new ‘white paper.’
Apparently it’s all part of a wider Conservative agenda to replace state intervention with private and corporate action! The idea is to shift responsibility for health and improving diets from the state to society and to convince people that public health is all about personal responsibility.
And no, this isn’t a joke, it is for real. And since its happening over there, we will probably see a version of it happening over here soon. So watch out for variations on the same theme here.
Published in Health & Wellbeing by Sue Kedgley on Wed, November 24th, 2010
Tags: Kelloggs, KFC, McDonalds, UK Govt
More posts by Sue Kedgley | more about Sue Kedgley
on the trolls and those who are unable to keep on topic
sheesh sue..you really need to read whoar more often..eh..?
i had that one back on the 14th..
http://whoar.co.nz/2010/mcdonalds-and-pepsico-to-help-write-uk-health-policy/
phil(whoar.co.nz)
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The forthcoming Trans Pacific Partnership Free Trade agreement will make this sort of thing ubiquitous throughout NZ legislation. Add in the Auckland super city, ECAN, the cancellation of the RMA etc. and Corporate NZ is upon us. Then add the search and surveilance legislation plus the anti-terrorist laws and we’ve effectively got a fascist state. Might as well run a sweepstake on who gets to be Il Duce.
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And why do you think taking personal responsibility for what you put in your own mouth is a bad thing ?
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What’s next a totally corporate government?
We are living in a brave new world.
Sick sick sick!!!!!!!!!
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The lumpenproletariat are such fools, they don’t know that foods high in sugar and fat are bad for them, they don’t know eating fresh fruit, vegetables and lean meat and fish are good for them. They don’t know deep fried takeaways are bad for them. They don’t know regular exercise helps you lose weight and reduces incidence of heart disease.
The only need the state to berate them, tell them what to do, then they can have strength, joy and satisfaction that someone is looking after them.
Nothing like wanting to treat the public like children, and get a bee in your bonnet about people making lifestyle decisions that you disapprove of – and yet I bet you dare to point a finger at those religious evangelists who do the very same thing on different matters.
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liberty scott..
the food companies/retailers peddle unhealthy/addictive sugar/fat-laden muck..
..disguised/marketed as food….
..and that advertising is a bunch of total lies..
..often directed at children..
..to persuade them to consume their ‘unhealthy/addictive sugar/fat-laden muck’..
…basically..unhealthy-poison…with radical/serious/expensive/ health outcomes…
of course they must be regulated/taxed into changing their ways..
..(btw…heard anything about our obesity-epidemic..?
..and the ‘costs’ of that..?
..should we just ‘carry on/nothing to see here..!..eh..?
.dream on..!..sunshine..!
..their poisonous/unhealthy-muck peddling/cowboy days are numbered…
phil(whoar.co.nz)
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I suspect that the reason why children enjoy the likes of McDonalds have little to do with the advertising and little to do with the toy, but more to do with the taste – unfortunately, vegetables can taste very bland compared with the unbland taste of the likes of McDonalds, and you cannot regulate taste.
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..their poisonous/unhealthy-muck peddling/cowboy days are numbered…
I really do hope so phil u.
John-ston
You can’t expect producers of vegetables and fruit to have the same advertising clout as huge multinational corporations with incredible resources and sophisticated processes of manipulation. However you can expect a government that does not pander to those multinational companies to properly regulate dangerous substances in our foods and reduce the harm caused. Keeping informed of this is a personal choice at the moment, because there’s not much momentum from any administration to educate the public.
Many major food producers have backing from medical conglomerates, which make money from various ways including people being sick. The current scenario is: you buy food that is packaged to look good and violently advertised to brain wash you, becoming unwell from the ingredients and additives which are known through various studies to be highly harmful, you then have to buy the medicine from the drug company (food additive producer). That drug has side effects, which cause another illness, so you need to buy another medicine and so on. These companies have had a long time to refine the process and are very clever so testing for such things is often difficult.
It’s a bit like a pusher getting somebody addicted to crack or heroin. The result of dependency is very similar. The addictive qualities of many additives and ingredients in our foods are well known. Often these things cause ones pallet to become less sensitive, so that only highly processed foods taste good. Many additives are known to be addictive and dangerous so there can be “regulation for taste” so to speak. The addicted think vegetables are bland because they have an unrefined pallet.
There’s only so much personal responsibility that can be placed on the individual though. To rectify the problem, we need proper regulation of the food industry especially in terms of ingredients that are known to be harmful or addictive. I hate to even drive past many fast food outlets now, knowing the harm they cause to such a vast amount of New Zealanders.
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because healthy food/manufacturers are in a minority…
..even food you may regard as ‘healthy’…is actually muck…
..it is a total cowboy/cowgirl-industry…
..with the health of their customers as their last/non-existant concern…
..then there is their unholy alliance with the advertising industry..
..and the litanies of lies they weave…
..aimed often..at children…
(‘coco-pops’..?..anyone..?..’nutri-grain’..?
..’put down that spoon..!…and step back from the bowl…!’)
..btw..sugar/fats are addictive…eh..?
http://whoar.co.nz/2010/food-addiction-could-it-explain-why-70-percent-of-americans-are-fat/
..that is why meat eaters also have an addiction…to those fats..
..but i digress..)
“..you cannot regulate taste…”
but you can regulate the (addictive/obesity-causing sugar/fat-levels…
..and…lets not forget…’additives’-content..
..and regulation of these bastards is one of the changes we have to make..
..and of course…stop those lying/poisons-peddling advertisments..
..and of course..no gst on healthy-foods..
phil(whoar.co.nz)
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The other issue here is that of mass production. Many fruits and vegetables are grown as quickly as possible and for their appearance. Growers employ various methods of fertilization and genetic modification to achieve this. Although sugar content is often tested for to know when to harvest, many crops are harvested too early so that the natural sweetness from properly ripe produce is not apparent. Perhaps there is merit to the argument that today’s fruit and vegetables are not very tasty. Maybe try some organic produce and get back to us.
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Nah, the advertising is aimed at making mcdonalds a fun experience and at getting kids to be socially conforming with macdonalds as the social norm. Kids are very responsive to social norms.
I doubt whether an inherent love of the taste has much to do with it. One of my daughters is fairly choosy about food but goes for plain pasta, carrots and cauliflower (as well as icecream). The other is into avocado and curry. Some kids seem to like fairly bland food and aren’t into the taste of meat or cabbage.
My older daughter just started school, at a school which seems to be into encouraging healthy eating. Still they had a bloody ronald mcdonald clown come in to talk about seatbelts or something. She wouldn’t recognise ronald mcdonald until the school foisted this on her.
Its all about the advertising – otherwise kids would be just as happy going to the burger bar down the road, not developing a brand loyalty at an early age.
Like George Orwell I’m not into imposing or regulating healthy eating, but I’d be happy to see regulations against advertising – and encouraging – junk food.
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Yes I can because there was a time when McDonalds was not a huge multinational corporation, and neither were any of these “evil” corporations. Also, it has been claimed that advertising results in children swarming toward products, so, wouldn’t smart advertising make children swarm toward apples, or pears, or bananas, or avocados, or brussels sprouts, or whatever?
Todd, you want to bankrupt us or something? While organic produce might have a different taste, it is about three to four times the price of non-organic produce.
In which case, don’t you think the right response would be for fruit and vegetable growers to engage in their own advertising campaigns?
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“In which case, don’t you think the right response would be for fruit and vegetable growers to engage in their own advertising campaigns?”
They do, but they are aimed at buyers rather than kids. It is hard for growers to make the appeal to a social norm/fun experience that a retailer like mcdonalds can.
BTW I watched Peter Watkin’s “Privilege” a few weeks ago – it includes a satire of a state-run apple advertising campaign featuring a pop star and a director who claims to be influenced by the Moscow Art Theatre!
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How is it difficult? If you are referring to the lack of premises, then what is preventing the set-up of salad bars to the McDonalds type model? If McDonalds can appeal to a social norm/fun experience, then surely the growers could make fruit and vegetables have a similar appeal.
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“Heaven forbid Sue, personal responsibility? You mean people shouldn’t take responsibility for the food they buy and eat? People shouldn’t take responsibility for whether they exercise or not?”
Quite – and, if we are going to tell the junk food corporations to go for it, why not do the same with the alcohol barons? I’m sure given a couple of decades and an enormous advertising budget they could normalise binge drinking the way junk food consumption has been normalised.
A few choice slogans – representing binge drinking as cool (Are you a binge drinker or a party sinker?, patriotic (Binge drinking – the great Kiwi tradition!), reasonable (You deserve a binge today!) or a mark of a decent person (A few beers brings our family together) and a vast increase in the number of liquor outlets should do it.
Having convinced everyone that binge drinking is part of our culture, normal and fun, we can then demand people exercise ‘personal responsibility’ and amuse ourselves attacking those who indulge in it.
So far as I can see, everybody wins.
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“How is it difficult?”
It is difficult, perhaps not impossible. Mcdonalds uses advertising combined with relatively low prices, cheap products and cheap labour. And the’ve been building up outlets and reputation for 35 years in NZ. Trying to compete would be hard – I imagine mcdonalds would steal any ideas that started to attract customers away from them. I imagine there might be a niche for a child-orientated healthy cafe in Wellington though, a one or two cafes seem to make a slight effort to attract people with kids and seem to do quite well out of it.
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Please explain then how Subway has been able to steal a march on McDonalds from an older audience? If you had a similar concept oriented toward families with children, then you would be able to hinder McDonalds quite quickly.
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Is Subway’s food actually better than McDonald’s? I’d guess McDonald’s has the price advantage over a salad bar, by virtue of scale, by low wastage (most of their food has a suspiciously long shelf life) and by choosing to sell food that’s production is easily mechanised.
Junk food also has the ‘instant buzz’ effect that healthy food lacks. Over my lifetime, McDonald’s has moved from ‘come for a treat’ advertising, to ‘come for breakfast/lunch/dinner as part of your normal life’ advertising. I’d guess heroin purchasers follow a similar history – from an occasional indulgence, to more frequent use, to an everyday necessity.
The other factor that impacts on food choice is time. I recall David Burton (Dominion Post food writer) wrote a great piece on the future of food around the millennium – part of a series on what the future holds – which ended with a rant in favour of an eight-hour working day. He reckoned food was in decline partly because people didn’t have time to cook properly.
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“Please explain then how Subway has been able to steal a march on McDonalds from an older audience?”
No idea really – I’ve never been to Subway and have no idea how they grew. I think they rely on smell. Maybe they have grown by trying for an older market and not competing with Mcdonalds for the kids.
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Yes! That’s why we need to remove advertising to children of unhealthy products. Creating advertising for good produce is not the main issue, our unhealthy diets, and the ill health they cause is.
You make a good case for New Zealand producing more organics for export john-ston. The reason organics are more expensive is somewhat due to the matter of production scale. The bigger the enterprise the cheaper the product will become. Yours is a convenient argument, but it does not account for subsidies on “cheaper” non-organic products, which are often harmful to us, and are the socially acceptable norm.
You deserve a binge today! Classic!
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No, that is why fruit and vegetable growers need to fight fire with fire. We need to see ad campaigns extolling the virtues of an apple a day, or having avocado sandwiches, or something like that. If advertising truly works, then that should fix the problem.
Also, part of the problem is that your organic produce is more likely to spoil during the production process.
How is a New Zealand grown product subsidised? I’ll grant that overseas products are subsidised.
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I totally agree. Because the populace feels the benefits, perhaps our representatives should pay for such campaigns as they have in the past.
I disagree. Organic produce picked at the right time has a better shelf life than GE produced crops with herbicides and pesticides residue picked at the wrong time. If by “production” you mean when it is produced ie grown, then a well-managed diverse biodynamic ecology is far superior to a managed ecology using herbicides and pesticides etc in that an imbalance is created. The former has the advantage of a sustainable system that looks after the soil whereas the later does not and strips many required ingredients from the soil. Crops grown using “chemical management” systems have a shorter lifespan in that after a few years, you cannot grow the same crop in that area.
There are subsidies in place for supermarket produce, particularly alcohol. Didn’t you know that?
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Like Starbucks arrives, so we get McCafe. Subway arrives so we have Deli Choices. You can even get WeightWatchers approved meals now.
Of course McD will compete vigourously in the instant gratification fast food space. Long gone are the (glory) days of Kroc’s McD vision, of the short menu (burgers, fries and shakes) with no alterations, modern Maccers is looking to prevent you wandering to the opposition. Have a look at this list of Maccers products for different markets on Wikipedia.
Anyway, McDonalds isn’t really a fast food chain; they’re landlords, they have the largest portfolio of retail spaceof anyone, a title they grabbed from Sears a good few years ago now. Who needs to sell burgers when you can just watch the rentals dosh pile in…
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It strikes me there are actually two separate issues getting mixed up here:
1) What is the state’s role (e.g. providing public health programs on good diet etc)?
2) Who should provide advice and help create government policy?
One can quite easily take the position that the state should not regulate what we eat (or don’t eat), and at the same time say that policy advice should come from within the public service, not from private companies.
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I’m astonished nobody took Sue up on this “will focus on persuading –or ‘nudging’—people to make healthier choices without force or regulation”
She doesn’t want people persuaded to make healthier choices, but forced.
Who does she think she is?
Oh and I’ve known people raised in families where fast food, chocolate and other such treats were banned from them, not allowed, and so whenever they could indulge they did – forbidden fruits.
Funny how people who are supposedly liberal get all calvinist/presbyterian like when it comes to what people ingest or feed their children.
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Maybe I didn’t make my own views 100% clear, but I agree with you that the government should not be regulating what people eat or don’t eat. I also don’t think the government should be having policy created for them by private companies; thats what the public service is meant to provide advice on,
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dbuckley, has Starbucks suffered because of McCafe? Has Subway suffered because of Deli Choices? Nope, in fact, McDonalds has suffered hugely from the competition over the last two decades.
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For lods sake…
Does not translate to:
You wouldn’t be a troll by any chance Libertyscott? Sue is talking about the situation in England, which might be mirrored in New Zealand, not the Greens proposal for healthier food through regulating dangerous substances and ingredients. Removing dangerous ingredients is not forcing consumers to do anything. It is ensuring that they do not become unwell because of their diets, something that costs taxpayers millions of dollars.
Why do you think we even care john-ston? You’re trying to highjack the thread and it is an important topic, one that deserves better consideration. We have one of the worst obesity epidemics around and you want to talk about fast food chains market share. We have one of the worst cancer rates around and you want to talk about better advertising being the answer. That’s like saying: “It’s the healthy food producers fault that people eat unhealthy fast food because they don’t advertise” or “Oh well! Half of you have cancer… lets just even it up and give everybody cancer then”. Not exactly helpful huh!
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“Funny how people who are supposedly liberal get all calvinist/presbyterian like when it comes to what people ingest or feed their children.”
Don’t see that advocating a sensible diet is Calvinist any more than saying “Don’t get pissed out of your brain every night” indicates wowserism.
My problem is that those with power (in this case wealthy junk food companies) have imposed themselves on our collective culture to the point that food that was once an occasional indulgence – a treat – is now considered everyday fare.
It took decades to de-normalise tobacco addiction. This wouldn’t have happened if people had shreiked “we musn’t infringe on individual choices” every time tobacco sales or advertising was regulated (actually the tobacco companies probably did – luckily it wasn’t fashionable to invite comapnies to self-regulate in those days).
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Samiuela – quite clearly common sense would dictate that corporations that have vested interests in profiteering from the consumption of their products should not be allowed to influence the government on policies that intrinsically effect their reputation, and subsequently their profit margins.
But equally, the green movement has been responsible for letting these large corporations get away with greenwashing their images, in some cases people who call themselves green (and even, dare I say, Green) have helped these companies find the right language and approach to peddle their products as ‘healthy’ and ‘eco-friendly’, which allows their influence on government and policy makers palatable enough for the public that they don’t get up in arms about news stories like this.
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Jonse,
The thing I find extremely objectionable is private companies writing government policy … I don’t care what policy is, it’s plain wrong.
On the other hand, McDonalds can try and call their food healthy and eco-friendly … provided they’re not telling blatant lies, I reckon its up to individuals to work out for themselves if they’ll eat the shite (and parents to lay down the law as to what their kids eat). By all means the government should provide education and information on healthy diets, but restricting the bad food is going too far.
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Todd, I am not here to hijack the thread, but I am raising what I feel to be quite an important issue – if you want people to eat healthier food, then why not simply take the fast food chains on at their own game. If it is advertising that draws the children to them, then have the fruit and vegetable growers counter with their own advertising campaign. If it is family friendly environments that draws the children to them, then have your own salad bars or something healthy with a family friendly environment.
You don’t need government intervention to fix the problem, all you need are people with the balls to actually counter the fast food chains at their own game – and if all your claims are correct, then it will fix the obesity problem as children will flock to eat their apples, oranges, beans, cabbage and brussels sprouts because Ralph Sprout said so on the television.
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1. Icecream is one of the worst foods you can eat, due to the high level of chemicals, plus it is made from uncooked egg white. If you don’t want cancer then make your own.
2. Grow your own: this is the only way to avoid all the chemical & poisonous sprays; The fruit you buy is picked while still green: thus o flavour, and high acid content, which will build up in your body & become toxic: cancer; arthritis etc.
3. Our culture has been brain washed into ‘fast food’ eating: since then world wide people have forgotten:the names of fruit & veg.;the taste of raw food; the healthy feeling when eating it; the health benifits; & most importantly how to cook! If you are are parent it is very irresponsible to bring your children up on fast foods. You & your future generations will pay the ultimate price!
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bygolly, you’re right!
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