Playing Politics with Our Food

By Anastasia Toufexis

"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.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Joe Lertola

CAPTION: BREAD-AND-BUTTER ISSUES

Beef and dairy lobbies helped to shape the old quartet of basic food groups. But nutritionists now favor a pyramid that puts less emphasis on fats and meat.

With reporting by Dick Thompson/Washington, with other bureaus