Center for Science in the Public Interest

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is the undisputed leader among America’s “food police.” CSPI was founded in 1971 by current executive director Michael Jacobson, and two of his co-workers at Ralph Nader’s Center for the Study of Responsive Law. Since then, CSPI’s joyless eating club has issued hundreds of high-profile—and highly questionable—reports condemning soft drinks, fat substitutes, irradiated meat, biotech food crops, French fries, and just about anything that tastes good.

CSPI fancies itself a “watchdog” group but behaves more like an attack dog, savaging restaurants, disparaging adults’ food choices, and discouraging even moderate alcohol consumption. It famously dubbed fettuccine alfredo a “heart attack on a plate.” Its nutrition nags encourage the public to “just say no” to fried mozzarella as though it were an illegal drug.

With a long history of writing letters to restaurants threatening legal action over purported mislabeling of “low fat” menu items, it surprised no one when CSPI graduated to lawsuit threats over the absence of nutritional labeling. In July of 2003, Jacobson teamed with legal shark John Banzhaf to formally warn six U.S. ice cream retailers that lawsuits may result from their refusal to immediately “list the calorie (and, ideally, saturated fat) content of each item” on menu boards.

CSPI’s self-anointed “experts” also encourage “a whole lot of lawsuits” against fast-food restaurants (the group says it is “looking at tobacco as a model”), mostly because they see legal action as leverage to enact all the restrictions on food they have long supported. These include, but are by no means limited to:

• extra taxes on foods with fat, sugar, and sodium (the so-called “Twinkie tax”);


• government-mandated “warning” labels on high-fat, high-calorie menu items;


• mandatory nutrition information on restaurant menus, menu-boards, meat packages, hamburger wrappers, food commercials, ice cream stores, movie theatres, bakeries, hot dog stands, etc., etc.


• requirements that broadcasters give free “equal time” to government-supported advertisements of “healthy” foods;


• restrictions on baby food packaging requiring that tapioca be labeled as “chemically modified food starch”;


• labels warning parents that soft drinks may be replacing low-fat milk, fruit juice, and other drinks in their children’s diets;


• labels warning of contamination from fresh, unpasteurized juices;


• a government-sponsored “Must-Not-See-TV Week” campaign; and


• stricter regulations on genetically enhanced foods, which are already the most regulated food products in the U.S.

To accomplish these goals, CSPI sends a flurry of petitions and letters to the FDA, the Department of Agriculture, the FTC, the Department of Health and Human Services, and any other government agency that has a role to play in regulating food. Each of these actions is accompanied by a breathless press release that seeks to scare ordinary consumers about the food they eat.

So Many Targets, So Little Time

CSPI complains about so many foods and beverages that it’s hard to think of anything that has escaped their wrath. Even so, the group has a special animus towards a few common foods. CSPI co-founder Michael Jacobson considers caffeine such a blight on civilization that he complains about people socializing over coffee. Unsurprisingly, he suggests that Americans patronize a “carrot juice house” instead. CSPI’s in-house food policies are so strict that Jacobson once reportedly intended to get rid of the office coffee machine—until one-third of his 60 employees threatened to quit.

CSPI also has a bias against meat and dairy. Jacobson, himself a vegetarian, wrote in an issue of CSPI’s Nutrition Action Healthletter that proper nutrition “means eating a more plant-based diet … It means getting your fats from plants (vegetable oils and nuts) and fish, not animals (meats, milk cheese, and ice cream).” In keeping with his personal vegetarianism, Jacobson quietly sits on the advisory board of the “Great American Meatout,” an annual event operated by the animal rights zealots at the Farm Animal Reform Movement (FARM).
Alcohol, even when consumed in moderation, is perhaps CSPI’s most hated product. The group’s Healthletter has asserted that “the last thing the world needs is more drinkers, even moderate ones.” CSPI wants hefty increases in beer taxes, increased restrictions on adult-beverage marketing, and even poster-sized warning labels placed in restaurants. George Hacker, who leads CSPI’s anti-alcohol effort, has accused winemakers of “hawking America’s costliest and most devastating drug.”

CSPI also opposes wineries’ plans to promote the well-documented health benefits of moderate wine consumption. As the Washington Times observed, “Jacobson argues that people can’t be trusted to make wise and healthful decisions on their own. He says that’s why CSPI is fighting the industry’s bid to include information about the health benefits of wine on the label of bottles.”

The thousands of readily available and relatively inexpensive food offerings we enjoy today are for CSPI something to lament. “People tend to eat most healthily during hard times,” Jacobson has argued. “Heart disease plummeted in Holland and Denmark during the most severe food shortages of World War II. Records of English manors in the 1600s reveal that the peasantry feasted on perhaps a pound of bread, a spud, and a couple of carrots per day.” And that, to Jacobson is “basically a wonderfully healthy diet.” Yum.

At least you can get your fill of spuds and carrots, right? Wrong. Not only does Jacobson argue that you should avoid most foods you currently enjoy, but he insists that you should limit your consumption to just-above-starvation levels. “With animals,” notes Jacobson, “hundreds of studies show that if you give them 80 to 60 percent of their normal calories, they live much longer.”

Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth

Background The Center on Alcohol Marketing and Youth (CAMY) is a  Johns Hopkins University Bloomberg School of Public Health-affiliated research organization that focuses on the marketing practices of the alcohol industry and tries to link alcohol advertising to underage drinking and alcohol abuse. The group claims that “high rates of underage alcohol consumption and the […]

National Center on Addiction & Substance Abuse

It has been over 70 years since alcohol prohibition was swept off the books in the United States, but the mindset behind it is definitely alive and kicking.

Since the 1950s, when research into substance abuse and addiction formally became part of the Public Health field, an enormous amount of financial and human resources has been poured into investigating the “whys and wherefores” of substance abuse. The vast majority of this work is truly scientific, pursued by conscientious researchers whose findings are based on careful inquiry, and confirmed by the stringent process of peer review.

As with any scientific discipline, however, not everyone in the field respects this time-honored recipe for scientific progress. While most scientists recognize that their primary mandate is to work out reliable explanations for how nature — or, in the case of addiction and substance abuse, human nature — works, there always seem to be a few bad apples in the research corps who insist on faking data, “cooking” the books, or otherwise crafting results to fit their prejudices. Their motives are almost always political, and they tend to complement their deceit with slick public-relations skills.

Such high public profiles and strong political acumen also tend to attract huge amounts of money from like-minded and deep-pocketed sources. In the case of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University, this financial confluence is compounded by the degree to which local and federal government agencies continue to pile on their support, often sending good money chasing after bad.

The CASA that Joe built

CASA’s fearless leader is Joseph A. Califano, Jr., a long-time policy wonk who, as chief domestic policy advisor to LBJ, was regarded as one of the key architects of the “Great Society” programs. Califano also served in President Jimmy Carter’s cabinet as Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare. Cater fired him in 1979, largely because, according to Washingtonian magazine, his “blunt, high-profile, self-promoting approach cost Carter too many political allies.”

After more than 12 years in private law practice, and a stint on the board of the Chrysler Corporation, Califano was approached by former Johnson & Johnson CEO James Burke (then in charge of the executive-branch Office of National Drug Control Policy, or ONDCP) with the idea to found CASA. Califano jumped at the chance, telling reporters that he was bored with practicing “commercial law,” and that he “wake[s] up every morning ready to roar.”

On May 18, 1992, the birth of the National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) was announced to the press, along with prominent mention of its sources of startup funding. United Press International reported that “more than $2 million” would come from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, “more than $5 million” from the Pew Charitable Trusts and the Rockefeller Foundation, and a single five-year, $8 million grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. This latter windfall represented the single largest grant in that foundation’s history (a $13-million-plus grant to CASA in 1998 would later raise the bar even higher).

The fact that CASA came about as the result of a request from the ONDCP director (a White House official) didn’t turn many heads in 1992, but perhaps it should have. At the time, a combination of private and public donors were already pouring $400 million per year into substance-abuse and addiction studies, mostly in long-standing university research programs. This new organization, with its initial endowment of over $15 million, promised to spread those resources even thinner. Furthermore, the appointment of Califano — a political firebrand, not a scientist — as CASA’s director was viewed with remarkably little suspicion.

While the press also noted that CASA’s new Medical Director, Dr. Herbert Kleber, had been ONDCP’s deputy director only two years before, nobody at the time asked about the propriety of ONDCP chairman James Burke using his office to drum up high-prestige work for a former colleague. It’s not clear whether CASA’s association with Columbia University had much to do with Kleber’s tenured position on Columbia’s psychiatry faculty, but it probably didn’t hurt.

Since CASA opened its offices in New York City, Califano has played a dual role as both rainmaker and spokesman. His boardroom contacts at Chrysler have yielded CASA corporate donations from the likes of CBS, Walt Disney, Citigroup, Bristol-Myers Squibb, American Express, and Travelers Insurance. His presumed gravitas as a former cabinet official has translated into the highest profile imaginable for just about any pronouncement his organization’s “research” dictates, no matter how baseless or logically contorted.

During the years of the Clinton Administration, Califano parlayed his Democratic Party credentials into a pair of multi-million-dollar fundraisers, titled “Concerts of Hope.” Featuring stars like Natalie Cole, En Vogue, Kenny G, Tim McGraw, and Wynnona, these events were televised by CBS and expressly honored then-First Lady Hillary Clinton for her (unspecified) efforts to combat substance abuse in children.

Fuzzy Math

Remarkable, but true: Califano’s enormous political clout and the $150 million dollars that he has raised since 1992, have brought about a “think/action tank” (in the words of CASA’s web site) that is widely considered a laughingstock among mainstream social scientists. The 2002 release of a CASA report, entitled “Teen Tipplers: America’s Underage Drinking Epidemic,” provides an explanation of why.

With the release of this report, Califano declared on February 26, 2002, that “underage drinkers account for 25 percent of all the alcohol consumed in the U.S.” It was a truly shocking, incendiary finding, aimed directly at America’s brewers and distilled spirits marketers. With teen drinking “out of control,” the CASA report argued, America had an obligation to quickly ban all alcohol advertising. Issued only weeks after NBC’s controversial decision to re-open its airwaves to liquor ads, CASA’s pronouncement was political opportunism at its worst.

The most shocking information about “Teen Tipplers,” though, was yet to come. Within 24 hours, it emerged that CASA’s central finding was just plain wrong. The New York Times, in an article entitled “Disturbing Finding on Youth Drinkers Proves to Be Wrong,” reported the following morning that the real proportion of alcohol consumed by American teens was less than half CASA’s published figure.

How did CASA’s “experts” come to publish such a falsehood? “Teen Tipplers” was based on a 1998 government project called the Household Survey on Drug Abuse, in which 25,500 people were interviewed in their homes. For a variety of legitimate reasons, the federal survey’s architects decided to “oversample” teenagers. While 38 percent of those surveyed were in the 12-20 age group, they make up only 13 percent of the American population.

CASA’s researchers, to say nothing of its leaders, managed to ignore this important distinction. The result was a headline-ready statistic that overstated the truth by over 200 percent. In the days following the release of “Teen Tipplers,” the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (SAMHSA), the very same federal agency that produces the Household Survey on Drug Abuse, issued a scathing news release announcing that CASA had misinterpreted its data. The real percentage of alcohol consumed by underage Americans, it announced, was just 11.4 percent.

The only remaining question was whether CASA’s error was an unintentional blunder or a willful deception. CASA president Joseph Califano provided the answer almost immediately. In an incredible show of hubris, Califano tried to justify his organization’s faulty statistics. One typical news report (out of over 200), written in the Baton Rouge Advocate, noted that Califano “defended his group’s decision not to make the [appropriate statistical] adjustment.”

Getting it 100 percent wrong

While this particular boneheaded arithmetical gaffe led to the most astonishing mistake in “Teen Tipplers,” it was by no means the report’s only ridiculous statement. Another of the report’s key findings was that “82.8 percent of adults who drink had their first drink of alcohol before age 21.” Here is another made-for-TV headline that says absolutely nothing of value. A majority of today’s adults grew up in an era when the minimum legal drinking age was 18 (most states raised the drinking age to 21 during the 1980s). In addition, the United States is remarkably puritanical when compared to other nations, very few of which set the legal drinking age so high. So millions of American “adults who drink” could easily have had their first tastes of alcohol — quite legally — before reaching their twenty-first birthday. CASA’s “82.8 percent” number presumably also includes Christian youngsters who are given wine with communion (an increasingly common phenomenon) as well as any college student who has visited Europe, Mexico, South America, or Canada.

It gets worse for CASA’s scientific integrity. A front-page New York Times account of CASA’s misdeeds noted that “alcohol consumption by teenagers dropped sharply in the 1980s” (when the drinking age rose to 21). Furthermore, the Times said, “the proportion of teenagers who engage in binge drinking has declined… In 1998, 6.6 percent of girls and 8.7 percent of boys 12 to 17 reported binge drinking, compared with 11 percent of the girls and nearly 19 percent of the boys a decade earlier” (emphases added).

So the real news was that teen drinking was becoming less of a problem. Yet CASA chose to twist reality in an attempt to convince Americans that teen drinking was “an epidemic.” And even as CASA’s “results” were being retracted by one television network after another, Califano never followed suit himself. Instead, CASA issued a second press release, insisting that “America has an underage drinking epidemic” and arguing that the real proportion of alcohol consumed by minors in America was probably even higher than it estimated, a number approaching “30 percent or more.” Instead of conceding that their numbers didn’t add up, CASA threw even more fuel on the fire.

Indeed, CASA remains unapologetic to this day. The original “Teen Tipplers” report can still be found on CASA’s web site, unchanged, and without the slightest hint that anything went wrong. Americans with $20 to spare can order a bound copy of the report, which comes without any mention that its central finding was flat wrong and thoroughly debunked.

The damage continues to pile up. Putting sensationalism before science, an April 1, 2002 TIME magazine cover story cited the CASA “Teen Tipplers” study in order make the point that the binge-drinking gap between teenage boys and girls had narrowed. TIME, like CASA, didn’t bother noting that teen binge-drinking rates for both sexes had drastically declined.

A “Serial Abuser of Statistics”

The “Teen Tipplers” episode was not the first time CASA has been exposed for factual distortion. In 1997 William London, the long-time Public Health Director of the American Council of Science and Health, told The Chronicle of Higher Education that CASA “is a group that is interested in painting the most alarming picture possible.”

Other scientists who study the effects of drugs and alcohol, normally not the most venom-tongued people in the world, are often unabashed in their condemnation of the goings-on at CASA. Craig Reinarman, a noted UC Santa Cruz sociologist, told Washingtonian magazine in 1998 that Califano is “not playing by the same rules that all other faculty and research centers have to play by.” Reinarman’s advice to Califano: “Don’t pretend you’re a Columbia University scholar when you’re not.”

Professor David J. Hanson, who has spent over 25 years studying drinking patterns among young people, told reporters that CASA’s “Teen Tipplers” report was “a political report, not a scientific study,” and declared that its research standards and methods “aren’t even acceptable at the undergraduate level.” He added that CASA has a tendency to “misinform the public, and diminish the credibility of all research in the field.”

And Joseph D. McNamara, a former Kansas City and San Jose police chief who now studies drug control policy at Stanford, told Washingtonian that “what CASA does is present information in a kind of hysterical-crisis mode… It’s a propaganda war.”

It’s a well-funded propaganda war, too. At the end of 2000, CASA had $44.9 million in the bank and was paying 6-figure salaries to at least 10 people. Califano took home the biggest chunk, with a personal salary over $375,000. And the Office of National Drug Control Policy — the White House department that first lured Califano to Columbia — has certainly taken care of CASA. In 2000 alone, ONDCP contributed $5.75 million.

Public Health Advocacy Institute

The Public Health Advocacy Institute (PHAI) is a lawsuit lounge where food cops and trial lawyers swap strategies to litigate away consumers’ food choices.

Located in Boston with a board composed of faculty members from the Northeastern University School of Law and Tufts University School of Medicine, PHAI’s goal is to attack food makers through lawsuits. Along the way, it is creating the next huge payday for trial lawyers, who are trying to demonize popular foods by using their template for attacking tobacco.

In addition to publishing papers laying out a game plan for fat lawsuits against food makers, PHAI’s main contributions to America’s growing anti-obesity jihad are its conferences, euphemistically titled “Legal Approaches to the Obesity Epidemic.” PHAI’s first conference, held in June 2003, was “intended to encourage and support litigation against the food industry.” The second conference, held in September 2004, was similarly motivated. Richard Daynard, director of PHAI’s Obesity and Law project, bragged to the New York Times in April 2004 that PHAI itself “will file suits against the food industry within the year.”

Shortly following its inaugural litigation-pushing confab, PHAI threatened eight large food companies with legal action. The group demanded food makers do the impossible — or else. To prevent costly lawsuits, PHAI warned, companies would have to prove that their actions had actually reduced obesity across the entire U.S. population by affecting Americans’ “buying and consumption of fat, total calories, and other contributions to obesity.” Food companies, in other words, could only get off the lawsuit hook by forcing consumers to change their behavior. What those consumers actually wanted was of no consequence.

None of this sits well with the American people. Michael Jacobson, president of the self-described “food police” at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), followed up his speech at PHAI’s 2003 event by proclaiming: “Consumers deserve to have their day in court if they believe that the foods they ate contributed to obesity and related diseases.” But just a week later, a Gallup poll showed that only 9 percent of Americans favored obesity lawsuits.

Who are the people behind PHAI? The group’s chairman, Anthony Robbins, told the Boston Globe that “Public health is more like police work than it is about medical care.” According to the American Lawyer, Daynard was called “greedy” by his fellow trial lawyers, after he took them to court for a larger piece of the tobacco litigation pie. Board member Mindy Lubber runs an investment firm tied to the Ralph Nader-founded state Public Interest Research Groups (PIRGs). Another board member — PHAI’s former executive director, Ben Kelley — was instrumental in perpetrating what the Los Angeles Times called “the biggest TV scam since the Quiz Scandals” when he ran a front group for trial lawyers looking to sue automakers. And PHAI “managing attorney” Jason Smith is a board member of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, a radical group that named cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal as an honorary “national vice president” in 1995.

This may sound like a motley crew of unlikely tort warriors. But at the end of PHAI’s 2003 conference, the group formed five committees — including one to promote obesity lawsuits among major law firms. In other words, PHAI was going lawyer shopping.

Addicted to Lawsuits

PHAI wouldn’t have much of a conference on obesity lawsuits without George Washington University law professor John Banzhaf, who claimed at the 2004 conference that he started the fast-food lawsuit movement when a reporter called him in 2002 and he prattled on about supposed similarities to tobacco cases. Banzhaf — who served as a legal advisor to fast-food plaintiffs in 2002 and 2003 — justified his position at the 2003 National Food Policy Conference, held by the Consumer Federation of America. At that event, Banzhaf railed: “I can’t sue to make people exercise more … But we can do something about fast food.”

While the public overwhelmingly opposes blaming restaurants and food companies for the nation’s weight, Banzhaf warned New York Daily News readers: “Somewhere there is going to be a judge and a jury that will buy this, and once we get the first verdict, as we did with tobacco, it will open the floodgates.” At the 2004 PHAI conference he reiterated: “When lawyers see how lucrative these are they will all join in.” He also insisted to CBS Sunday Morning: “We’re going to sue them and sue them and sue them.”

In true ambulance-chasing fashion, Banzhaf even broached the notion of suing doctors for not trimming down their patients. At the 2003 conference, he asked: “Can physicians who do not advise overweight or obese or morbidly obese patients to lose weight, to take reasonable efforts to help them do so, might ought [sic] to be subject to malpractice action?” He made the exact same point at the 2004 conference, saying simply: “Let’s sue some doctors.”

Banzhaf’s target list is long. At one point during the 2003 conference proceedings, PHAI director Anthony Robbins interrupted Banzhaf to question whether he really advocated a system that could pit “fat people” against “thin people.” Banzhaf’s reply? “Absolutely.”

Parents are also in Banzhaf’s crosshairs. He suggested to the 2004 conference participants that they “go after parents with TVs in their [kids’] rooms.” Parents who allow children to become obese, Banzhaf insisted, should be disadvantaged in custody cases, just as a parent’s smoking habits have been included in some custody agreements.

The wacky legal theories don’t stop there. Banzhaf has threatened to sue the Seattle School Board — and individual school board members — for making soft drinks available to teenagers in school. He raised the possibility again at PHAI’s 2004 conference. He has also discussed going after milk producers because the famous “Got Milk?” ads don’t always mention the benefits of skim milk.

While Banzhaf wants to sue food companies for supposedly making Americans fat, he has also promoted lawsuits against Weight Watchers for trying to do the reverse. In January 2003 Banzhaf argued the company shouldn’t be allowed to charge customers for basic nutrition information. “Everybody knows that if you want to lose weight, you eat less with less calorie input and more exercise,” he stated.

At the 2004 PHAI confab, the assembled food cops discussed Banzhaf’s favorite question in a session titled “Are Some Foods Addictive?” Just two days before the 2003 conference, he sent letters to six fast-food chains demanding that they display “warning” notices about the allegedly “addictive” nature of fatty foods. Otherwise, he said, they could expect a big fat lawsuit. Banzhaf even claimed that fast food “can act on the brain the same way as nicotine or heroin.”

Apparently some at PHAI take Banzhaf’s farcical notion seriously. In an article accompanying the 2004 conference, Daynard and his co-authors complained of supposedly “addictive high calorie sodas.”

A primary source of the “food addiction” theory is the misnamed Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), the medical front-group for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. PCRM president Neal Barnard’s contribution to the cause is an aggressive effort to convince an unsuspecting public that meat, cheese, and chocolate are “addictive.” Barnard told a 2003 FDA panel that cheese is merely “dairy crack … the purest form of the drug [milk].” Barnard’s name also appears four times in the plaintiff’s brief as an “expert” source in one of the obesity cases Banzhaf advised.

PCRM sent its top legal counsel, Mindy Kursban, to the inaugural PHAI meeting and nutritionist Amy Joy Lanou to the 2004 gathering. Former PCRM analyst and 2004 PHAI speaker Michele Simon has also endorsed the addictive foods farce.

Public Relations

At the end of PHAI’s 2003 conference, board member Richard Daynard insisted that the movement needed a “master script,” and he stressed that lawsuits might fail without broader support. He suggested a combination of grassroots organizing, boycotts, and shareholder activism, all tied together with celebrity spokespersons. “Political will is everything,” Daynard told Seed Magazine. “The majority of judges and jurors are also parents.”

Part of PHAI’s public-relations strategy is to apply the tactics that made Daynard and Banzhaf successful in suing tobacco companies, including the creation of groups like PHAI. As recently as November 2003, phone calls to a number distributed during PHAI’s first conference were directed to a recorded message from the Tobacco Control Resource Center — a parallel organization run by Daynard.

Daynard’s fellow trial lawyer, Banzhaf, told the 2004 conference that despite lacking a real legal success, PR tactics were working. “We’re doing well and we’re ahead of schedule,” he said.

Employing his old PR tricks, Daynard knew the media frenzy over our national weight gain provided the right backdrop for promoting ridiculous lawsuits. He told Fortune magazine: “What persuaded us was, in a sense, the media. This thing is so radioactive in terms of media attention that cases will bring in other lawyers and bring in other cases.”

Publicity is just about the only thing 2004 conference speaker Stephen Joseph was seeking when he brought an absurd lawsuit to prevent Kraft from selling its Oreo cookies to anyone under the age of 21. After Joseph admitted his suit was mostly a publicity stunt, the Chicago Tribune reported that the British-born lawyer was “criticized in legal circles for possibly abusing the U.S. courts system.”

Daynard and Robbins co-authored an article called “Food Litigation: Lessons From the Tobacco Wars,” in which they write: “In the absence of proof that particular food industry practices cause obesity, suits seeking compensation for obesity-related injury are unlikely to succeed.” For most people, that would mean “case closed” — but not for greedy trial lawyers and control-starved public-health zealots.

That’s where William Dietz of the Centers for Disease Control, scheduled 2003 and 2004 PHAI speaker (though he became a last-minute no-show at each), comes in. In April 2003 he published an article in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that amounted to a collection of lessons from demonizing tobacco for obesity policy, including greater research into which specific foods supposedly cause obesity.

Personal Responsibility: MIA at PHAI

PHAI supporters don’t believe that consumers are smart enough to make their own food decisions. PHAI director James Hyde told conference attendees that personal responsibility is a “myth.” Robbins seems to believe that human beings have no more decision-making ability than animals, telling the Rutland Herald in 2003: “We’re being fattened like a herd.” In a 2003 article in Poverty & Race, Robbins, Daynard and PHAI director Wendy Parmet extol “public health professionals who know that overweight and eating habits are not principally a matter of personal choice.” (When asked by a reporter in 2003 how he lost 25 pounds, Daynard simply said: “I ate a lot less.”)

PHAI’s invited speakers sing the same anti-personal responsibility tune. “With so many mothers working,” Philip James told PHAI trial sharks, “I think maybe we need to highlight the role of the ‘Nanny State.'” James, a 2003 and 2004 speaker and head of the International Obesity Task Force (IOTF), would replace parents with big government. Complaining to news outlets about “high-pressure marketing” to children, he claimed that “the idea that you can have a modified system, or that parents should control it, is nonsense.”

In an article accompanying the 2004 conference, James and his IOTF colleagues Neville Rigby and Shiriki Kumanyika argued: “This ‘personal responsibility’ approach has … clearly failed.”

Scheduled 2004 PHAI speaker Margo Wootan (who canceled at the last minute) urged a different public-health conference to “move beyond personal responsibility.” PHAI speakers Marion Nestle and Kelly “Big Brother” Brownell declared in TIME magazine that “personal responsibility is a trap” and “a failed experiment.” And, of course, there’s always Banzhaf, who whined in 2003: “All these platitudes about, ‘people should eat less,’ ‘responsibility,’ all this crap!”

Food Cop Influence Abounds

The Naderite spin-off group CSPI has a food-enemies list a mile long. If the group had its way, edibles from waffles to wine would be taxed, labeled and/or banned. CSPI’s Jacobson is a cheerleader for lawsuits, arguing at PHAI’s 2003 conference that it’s “going to take a whole lot of lawsuits” to trim people down. He told the gathering: “I’m not on the fence … about litigation. I think it’s an extremely important strategy. I’m excited to see some litigators, including John Banzhaf and others, in the room.”

Jacobson was even helpful enough to suggest possible litigation targets, including companies that advertise some foods to children, and restaurants that don’t stick nutrition labels on virtually everything they sell. In typical CSPI fashion, Jacobson took a bad idea and made it even more ridiculous: “Should schools be promoting health or disease? … they’re not allowed to read pornography in English class — should they be allowed to have sodas in the hallways?”

At the 2004 conference, CSPI’s “legal” influence was in full force, fielding four litigation-loving speakers. Jacobson was joined by CSPI “legal advisor” Ellen J. Fried and Steve Gardner of the newly-minted “CSPI Litigation.” Gardner titled his presentation “Patience, hell. Let’s sue somebody” and boasted in his speech: “We can sue anywhere we want to and we will.” According to Obesity Policy Report, that phrase “accurately captured the mood of the audience.” According to that publication, Gardner departed saying, “If you want to sue, call me.”

Jacobson teamed up with Banzhaf in July 2003, threatening lawsuits against six ice cream retailers. The duo warned that unless their stores provided calorie counts on the menus, they would be slapped with suits.

Tides Foundation & Tides Center

When is a foundation not a foundation? When it gives away other foundations’ money.

Most of America’s big-money philanthropies trace their largesse back to one or two wealthy contributors. The Pew Charitable Trusts was funded by Joseph Pew’s Sun Oil Company earnings, the David & Lucille Packard Foundation got its endowment from the Hewlett-Packard fortune, the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation grew out of General Motors profits, and so on. In most cases, the donors’ descendants manage and invest these huge piles of money, distributing a portion each year to nonprofit groups of all kinds (the IRS insists that at least 5 percent is given away each year). This is the way philanthropic grantmaking has worked for over a century: whether a given endowment’s bottom line occupies six digits or twelve, the basic idea has remained the same.

Now comes the Tides Foundation and its recent offshoot, the Tides Center, creating a new model for grantmaking — one that strains the boundaries of U.S. tax law in the pursuit of its leftist, activist goals.

Set up in 1976 by California activist Drummond Pike, Tides does two things better than any other foundation or charity in the U.S. today: it routinely obscures the sources of its tax-exempt millions, and makes it difficult (if not impossible) to discern how the funds are actually being used.

In practice, “Tides” behaves less like a philanthropy than a money-laundering enterprise (apologies to Procter & Gamble), taking money from other foundations and spending it as the donor requires. Called donor-advised giving, this pass-through funding vehicle provides public-relations insulation for the money’s original donors. By using Tides to funnel its capital, a large public charity can indirectly fund a project with which it would prefer not to be directly identified in public. Drummond Pike has reinforced this view, telling The Chronicle of Philanthropy: “Anonymity is very important to most of the people we work with.”

In order to get an idea of the massive scale on which the Tides Foundation plays its shell game, consider that Tides has collected over $200 million since 1997, most of it from other foundations. The list of grantees who eventually received these funds includes many of the most notorious anti-consumer groups in U.S. history: Greenpeace, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), Environmental Media Services, Environmental Working Group, and even fringe groups like the now-defunct Mothers & Others for a Livable Planet (which used actress Meryl Streep to “front” the 1989 Alar-on-apples health scare fraud for NRDC).

For corporations and other organizations that eventually find themselves in these grantees’ crosshairs, there is practically no way to find out where their money originated. For the general public, the money trail ends at Tides’ front door. In many cases, even the eventual recipient of the funding has no idea how Tides got it in the first place.

Remarkably, all of this appears to be perfectly legal. The IRS has traditionally been friendly toward this “donor-advised” giving model, because in theory it allows people who don’t have millions of dollars to use an existing philanthropy as a “fiscal sponsor.” This allows them to distribute their money to worthwhile charities, while avoiding the overhead expenses of setting up a whole new foundation.

In practice, though, the Tides Foundation has turned this well-meaning idea on its head. When traditional foundations give millions of dollars to Tides, they’re not required to tell the IRS anything about the grants’ eventual purposes. Some document it anyway; most do not. When Tides files its annual tax return, of course, it has to document where its donations went — but not where they came from.

Where the Money Comes From

The Tides Foundation is quickly becoming the 800-pound gorilla of radical activist funding, and this couldn’t happen without a nine-figure balance sheet. Just about every big name in the world of public grantmaking lists Tides as a major recipient. Anyone who has heard the closing moments of a National Public Radio news broadcast is familiar with these names.

In 1999 alone, Tides took in an astounding $42.9 million. It gave out $31.1 million in grants that year, and applied the rest to a balance sheet whose bottom line is over $120 million. Since 1996, one foundation alone (the Pew Charitable Trusts) has poured over $40 million into Tides. And at least 17 others have made grants to Tides in excess of $100,000.

The Tides Center: A Legal Spin-Off

While Tides makes its name by facilitating large pass-through grants to outside groups, many of Tides’ grantees are essentially activist startups. Part of Tides’ overall plan is to provide day-to-day assistance to the younger groups that it “incubates.” This can translate into program expertise, human resources and benefits management, assistance with facilities leasing, and even help with public relations and media. Tides typically charges groups 8 percent of their gross income for these services.

Until recently, these administrative functions were provided to grantees by the Tides Foundation itself. But in order to limit exposure to any lawsuits that might be filed against its many affiliated groups (many injured parties have considered suing environmental groups in recent years), a new and legally separate entity was born. In 1996 the Tides Center was spun off, insulating the Foundation’s purse and permanently separating Tides’ grantmaking and administrative functions.

Many environmental groups that now operate on their own got their start as a “project” of the Tides Center. These include the Environmental Working Group, Environmental Media Services, and the Natural Resources Defense Council — which was itself founded with a sizable Tides “grant.” The Tides Center began with a seemingly innocent transfer of $9 million from the Tides Foundation. The Center immediately took over the operations of nearly all of the Tides “projects,” and undertook the task of “incubating” dozens more. There are currently over 350 such projects, and the number grows each year.

This practice of “incubation” allows Tides to provide traditional foundations with a unique service. If an existing funder wants to pour money into a specific agenda for which no activist group exists, Tides will start one from scratch. At least 30 of the Tides Center’s current “projects” were created out of thin air in response to the needs of one foundation or another.

The Tides Center board of directors has been especially busy of late. In 2001 the first Tides “franchise” office (not counting Tides’ presence in Washington and New York) was opened in Pittsburgh. This new outpost, called the Tides Center of Western Pennsylvania, was erected largely at the urging of Pittsburgh native Teresa Heinz (the widow of Senator John Heinz, the ketchup heir). Heinz pulls more strings in the foundation world than almost any other old-money socialite; she’s presently married to U.S. Senator John Kerry (D-MA). The Tides Foundation has collaborated on funding projects with the Heinz Endowments (Teresa Heinz’s personal domain) for over 10 years.

The tangled web

The Tides “complex” has established itself as an important funding nexus for movements and causes aligned with leftist ideology. Everyone who’s anyone in the big-money activist world now has some connection to Drummond Pike and his deputies.

Consider that as early as 1989, when the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) wanted to promote the now-infamous health scare about apples and the chemical additive Alar, the Tides Foundation was used as a financial conduit to allow NRDC to pay Fenton’s fees. NRDC was itself set up by Tides, and has since incorporated on its own, one of over a dozen other multi-million dollar former Tides projects to do so.

Fenton Communications, itself a touchstone for radical political campaigns, made use of the Tides Center to set up its Environmental Media Services (EMS) in 1994 (it has also since emerged from under Tides’ protection and formally set up shop in Fenton’s offices). The fact that Tides originally ran EMS’ day-to-day operations provided PR spinmeister David Fenton with “plausible deniability” — a ready-made alibi against charges that this supposedly “nonpartisan” media outfit was just a shill for his paying clients. Now, of course, we all know that it is just that.

Similar stories can be told about SeaWeb, the Environmental Working Group, the National Environmental Trust (formerly known as the Environmental Information Center) and the Center for a Sustainable Economy, each of which received millions while under the Tides umbrella. Besides having been “incubated” in this fashion, the other principal commonality among these organizations is a client relationship with Fenton Communications.

The depth and financial implications of the Tides/Fenton connection is truly impressive, if not surprising. After all, long-time Fenton partner and recently-departed Environmental Media Services chief Arlie Schardt has sat on the board of the Tides Center/Tides Foundation complex since the very beginning. At present, the Fenton Communications client list includes at least 36 Tides grantees, as well as 10 big-money foundations that use Tides as a pass-through funding vehicle just about every year. In some cases, the Tides Foundation has been used to funnel money from one Fenton client to another.

Even taking into account the peculiar relationship between Tides and its in-house “projects,” Tides only spends about 40% of its money on these organizations. The rest goes to other left-leaning grantees, many of which have managers or board members that are connected to Tides in other ways.

For instance, the Tides Center’s corporate registration documents on file in Minnesota show that Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) president Mark Ritchie is its “registered agent.” This might explain why the Tides Foundation has paid over $20,000 to a commercial corporation owned by Ritchie and his brother. It’s a “sustainable coffee” company called Headwaters Inc., which does business with the public using the name Peace Coffee. The Ritchie brothers run this for-profit venture out of the same offices of their nonprofit (IATP), which just happens to advocate society’s total conversion to Peace Coffee’s main product. It’s a clever bit of flim-flammery, and the Tides Foundation has been helping to foot the bill.

This is business as usual for Mark Ritchie, though. He is the mastermind behind several other food-scare and health-scare organizations, all of which get appreciable funding through his Tides connection. A Tides Center “project” called the Trade Research Consortium lists its purpose as “research that illuminates the links between trade, environmental, and social justice.” Ritchie is its only discernable contact person. Similarly, Ritchie’s IATP runs the organic-only food advocacy group Sustain, but has taken great pains to hide this relationship (the group’s Internet domain listing was altered just hours after the connection was noted in an on-line discussion group in 2001). Ritchie also started the Consumer’s Choice Council, a Tides grantee that lobbies for “eco-labels” on everything from soybeans to coffee.

Tides also maintains an interesting relationship with the multi-billion-dollar Pew Charitable Trusts. Since 1993 Pew has used the Tides Foundation and/or Tides Center to “manage” three high-profile journalism initiatives: the Pew Center for Excellence in Journalism, the Pew Center for Civic Journalism, and the Pew Center for the People and the Press. These Pew “Centers” are set up as for-profit media companies, which means that Pew (as a “private foundation”) is legally prohibited from funding them directly. Tides has no such hurdle, so it has gladly raked in over $95 million from Pew since 1990 — taking the standard 8 percent as pure profit.

In practice, the social reformers at the helm of the Pew Charitable Trusts use these media entities to run public opinion polling; to indoctrinate young reporters in “reporting techniques” that are consistent with Pew’s social goals; and to “promote” (read: subsidize) actual reporting and story preparation that meets Pew’s definition of “civic journalism.” Civic journalism, by the way, is defined as reporting that “mobilizes Americans” behind issues that Pew considers important.

Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity

Introduction

The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale is the home institution of Kelly Brownell, the godfather of the movement to institute Twinkie taxes (or junk food taxes) on certain foods and drinks. The Center, backed by money from the “public health” community’s closely aligned think tank and cash machine, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, promotes taxes and regulations on specific foods and beverages with research and messaging assistance for bureaucrats and politicians while presenting itself as a non-ideological scientific research center.

Background

The Rudd Center is the result of a collaboration among Yale University, Leslie Rudd (the proprietor of the high-priced, upper-class Dean and Deluca grocery chain), and Kelly Brownell, a professor of psychology at Yale. The Center uses Yale’s prestige to advocate for draconian government regulations of the food and beverage industries and to develop “legal strategies” to attack restaurants and food companies.The Center is a policy advocacy organization that offers messaging assistance to supporters and policymakers and tracks policy proposals that affect what it calls the “toxic food environment.” Interestingly, while the Center and Brownell promote an environmental theory as the cause of overeating and obesity, Brownell’s own theory of the individual diet, the “Lifestyle, Exercise, Attitudes, Relationships and Nutrition&rdquo (LEARN) Program, relies on controlling self-defeating attitudes.

In addition to receiving $5 million in seed money from the Rudd Foundation, the Rudd Center has also received $5 million from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF), a private foundation seeded by a Johnson and Johnson heir that holds $800 million of stock in the medical equipment and pharmaceutical company. RWJF is an institution dedicated to developing and advocating for command-and-control policies that reduce consumer choice and increase the power of bureaucrats in the health system and the health environment. Among the strategies it has endorsed for reducing obesity is the adoption of food “pricing strategies”—i.e. “sin” taxes and “virtue” subsidies—to influence food item consumption.

The Center’s Food Marketing and Childhood Obesity Steering Committee reads like a “Who’s Who” of big-government public health activists. Former New York City food-cop-in-chief Thomas Frieden served on it until he was appointed to head the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: His successor, Thomas Farley, replaced him. The Steering Committee is also stacked with RWJF-funded researchers and staffers and formerly included an RWJF board member.

With that makeup, it’s not hard to figure out what the Rudd Center blames for the nation’s weight problems and what it proposes should be done. The Center promotes draconian marketing regulations for food products and most prominently taxes on sugar-sweetened beverages while advocating within the scientific community for the notion of “food addiction.” Additionally, the Center develops and promotes legal strategies for addressing concerns that its preferred policies violate the Constitution and for enabling lawsuits against restaurants and other food companies.

A major part of the Rudd Center’s mission is providing big-brother public health campaigns with messaging assistance. In a 2007 article for The Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, Brownell and Marlene Schwartz, the Rudd Center’s Director of Research and School Programs, wrote, “How the obesity issue is framed is of the utmost importance to how it is addressed.”

Later in the same article — after complaining that Americans are insufficiently collectivist-minded to make public intervention easy — Brownell and Schwartz proposed ways to “sell” their diagnosis and treatment for obesity. Why “sell”? The vast majority of Americans don’t believe the Rudd Center’s claim that food companies are responsible for obesity. A Reuters/Ipsos poll found only 19.4 percent of Americans agreed that the “actions of fast food and grocery industries” were the main cause of obesity. Over 60 percent responded that “personal choices about eating and exercising” were the main cause.

To “sell” the diagnosis, Brownell and Schwartz argued that activists should begin “a concerted research program on framing and persuasion” — a.k.a. spin — to test “the power of different messages and frames to gain public support for the idea that the [food and lifestyle, but principally food] environment is responsible for the increase in obesity.” The article betrays another problem with the Rudd Center’s approach: It is ideologically committed to a particular view of the obesity problem. Brownell has publicly advocated the “toxic food environment” theory of obesity in those exact terms since at least 1996, when he used the phrase in an interview with The New York Times. Interestingly, Brownell continued promoting the personal responsibility-focused LEARN program despite holding this contradictory view.

The Rudd Center believes Americans should pay more for their food. Brownell has called for an end to a “cheap food model” and was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “What you want is to reverse the fact that healthy food is too expensive and unhealthy food is too cheap, and the soda tax is a start [emphasis added].”

Motivation

The Rudd Center serves as a hybrid political boot camp and public relations house for big government activists and trades on Brownell’s standing in a “public health” world that is dominated by anti-choice thinking. The motivation of the Center appears to be largely ideological, bringing to mind an old warning from C.S. Lewis: “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive” — for “those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

Kelly Brownell: Public Health’s Captain Ahab

Brownell first proposed taxing unhealthy foods in the early 1990s, and since that time he has co-authored editorials pushing this hobby-horse with Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) and Thomas Frieden (then of the NYC Department of Health, now in charge of the CDC). The Rudd Center is devoted to putting this policy into law.

Brownell has not wavered from the position that “fat taxes” are an effective policy tool against obesity. He’s only wavered on the size and targets of the necessary tax.

Brownell wrote in a 1994 New York Times op-ed:

Congress and state legislatures could shift the focus to the environment by taxing foods with little nutritional value. Fatty foods would be judged on their nutritive value per calorie or gram of fat. The least healthy would be given the highest tax rate.

In 2000, he co-authored a call to tax “soft drinks, candy, gum, and snack foods” with Michael Jacobson of the Center for Science in the Public Interest:

A steep tax would probably reduce the consumption of the taxed foods and could be used to generate funding to subsidize healthful foods […] there are mixed opinions on the feasibility and desirability of a steep tax. In contrast, a small tax may be more politically feasible and still could generate significant revenues to support health measures.

In 2009, he co-authored a call to tax soda with then-New York City Health Commissioner Thomas Frieden which promoted the “penny per ounce” talking point:

Given the heavy consumption of sugared beverages, even small taxes will generate substantial revenue, but only heftier taxes will significantly reduce consumption.

Later in 2009, Brownell attempted to soften criticism of the proposal with another call to tax soda and related sugary beverages, co-authored by Frieden’s replacement Thomas Farley and others:

As with any public health intervention, the precise effect of a tax cannot be known until it is implemented and studied, but research to date suggests that a tax on sugar-sweetened beverages would have strong positive effects on reducing consumption.

When in 2010 research funded by the tax-endorsing Robert Wood Johnson Foundation showed weakness in the case for sugary beverage taxes, Brownell told TIME:

The fact is that nobody has been able to see how people will really respond under these conditions.

Brownell has additionally served on the scientific advisory board to CSPI’s flagship publication, the Nutrition Action Healthletter.

In the 1980s, Brownell developed a diet program called LEARN, an acronym for “Lifestyle, Exercise, Attitudes, Relationships and Nutrition.” He published a book detailing the program.

According to a feature on LEARN published in The New York Times, the diet program is dependent on people “identifying self-defeating attitudes — [Brownell] calls them ‘attitude traps’ — and devising effective strategies to prevent a relapse.”

In a St. Louis Post-Dispatch article, Brownell argued along similar lines that weight-loss plateaus could be overcome: “But you can ride [plateaus] out if you can distract yourself and increase self-control [emphasis added].”

This is a profound irony in light of Brownell’s adamancy in promoting the ultimate “attitude trap”; namely, that lifestyle changes are near-impossible in light of the “toxic food environment.” Brownell trashes personal responsibility publicly while promoting a diet which relies on building up one’s personal responsibility.

Creating “McVictims”

The public relations activity of the Rudd Center focuses on “repositioning” people as victims of society and excusing their lack of personal responsibility. To do this, the Center promotes the adoption of an addiction model of individual overeating and an “obesogenic environment” model of population obesity. Additionally, Rudd Center publications promote the idea that the obese should become a governmentally protected victim class.

The two tactics are inextricably linked. Without “victim” status for the obese, the Rudd Center cannot blame the “toxic food environment” and dismiss issues of personal irresponsibility. Brownell and Schwartz write:

The prevailing emphasis on personal responsibility for obesity can divert attention from needed public health interventions, and also leads to widespread stigma directed at overweight individuals.

Rebecca Puhl, a Rudd Center-affiliated researcher, wrote in the American Journal of Public Health:

That is, unless people have adequate resources (e.g., access to affordable, healthy foods) to resist the obesogenic environment, it is too difficult (and unjust) to expect individual actions to be successful. Thus, although this approach does not ignore personal responsibility, the emphasis is shifted from personal blame to an issue of social justice.

In the long run, Brownell has expressed hope that the Rudd Center’s work will “change the legal landscape” around food. By recasting the obese as a protected class victimized by the food industry, Brownell hopes to reshape the debate over food policy and enable lawsuits against food companies. And at the end of the road, no doubt, are expert witness retainers for the Center’s researchers.

Black Eyes

The Sophisticates Can Look After Themselves

Perhaps fittingly for an organization funded in large part by a purveyor of fine wines, teas, and organic foods, the Rudd Center identifies malicious food products in the mass market but pays scant attention to up-market retailers. Indeed, the Rudd Center’s most prominent policy, the “penny-per-ounce” sugar sweetened beverage tax, does not apply to beverages that primarily appeal to up-market buyers. The Rudd Center supports taxes containing a “latte loophole” which exempts coffee grounds, tea bags, and coffee prepared to-order at a coffee shop. But people can sweeten or add caloric milk to homemade coffee and teas, suggesting that a prejudice against the “unrefined” taste for soda is just as relevant to Rudd Center policymaking as concern for health.

Likewise, alcoholic beverages such as wine are exempted from these taxes despite containing calories. Both the café beverage loophole and the alcoholic beverage loophole are excused despite some coffee drinks and alcoholic beverages containing more calories per ounce than sugar-sweetened beverages.

Perhaps fittingly given the loopholes the Rudd Center will permit, Leslie Rudd, the Rudd Center’s namesake and benefactor, is a premium gin distiller, highly rated Napa Valley vintner, alcoholic beverage distributor, and grocer to the upper class. Among the offerings from Rudd’s grocery Dean and Deluca’s online shopping service are (as of May 2012):

• A 1.5 lbs. lobe of foie gras: $120
• An “International Caviar Sampler”: $350
• Four pints of “Luxury Sorbet”: $60
• A “Seasonal Assortment” of three pints of ice cream: $45
• Dry Aged Beef Burgers (3 lbs.): $55 ($18.33/lb.)
• A 3 lbs. rack of lamb: $160 ($53.33/lb.)

The wine selections at Dean and Deluca include red wines priced in excess of $300 per bottle. It should go without saying that anyone who can afford to pay those prices can easily afford a “penny-per-ounce” tax on a soft drink without changing his or her behavior, if one even applied to his or her choices.

The Rudd Center is also willing to promote sugar-sweetened beverage taxes that do not tax coffees prepared for the consumer, even though these beverages can contain more calories than soft drinks. The Rudd Center conducted a 2010 webinar offering answers to questions on the soft drink taxes proposed that year. According to a summary of questions asked, café coffees prepared “individually for customers” were specifically exempt. Deference to supposedly aesthetically refined “yuppie” tastes is evident in this activity.

In the Rudd Center’s view, the refined consumer who buys a latte from a coffee shop every morning is apparently an adult, not an addict: The consumer who has a soda with lunch is little more than a child. That person is a victim who must be cured of an “addiction.” In public statements, Brownell puts himself in the adult class of consumer. In response to questions during the promotional tour for his book Food Fight about his personal weight gain, the AP reported:

Brownell himself […] sports a good-sized paunch thanks, he says, to a book project that has kept him relatively sedentary and snack-prone for the last year or so.

Brownell was directly confronted on the issue of his own weight gain in 2003 on National Public Radio. He neither denied the role of his own decision making in his weight gain nor claimed to be an addict or a victim.

Brownell told O, The Oprah Magazine the following for a feature on weight control scientists’ personal diet and exercise habits:

For me weight is a real issue. It bounces up and down by 30 to 40 pounds. I have to be very vigilant because I’m one of those who eat more when stressed. I try to manage the pressures in my life by making time to relax and being physically active-I play tennis, walk, run, or bike-and I try to make healthy food choices (lots of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains). I like to think of food as something that nurtures me and makes me healthy rather than seeing my diet as restrictive.

The Prohibitionist Impulse

Although in public statements Rudd Center officials are adamant that they do not wish to repeat with non-alcoholic beverages the mistake that was Prohibition, Rudd Center scholars have written unmistakably (non-alcoholic beverage) Prohibitionist policy proposals in works for the public health community. Jennifer Pomeranz, the Rudd Center’s Director of Legal Initiatives, offers a series of policies in a Journal of Public Health Policy article that would be allowable under United States law. She considers soda Prohibition as possible but unlikely, with no comment as to its possible effectiveness or drawbacks:

It is unlikely that a government would ban all sugary drinks […],but some countries and states have banned or negotiated with companies to remove from retail sale specific beverages that may pose a public health risk.

Unsurprisingly, the Rudd Center swiftly endorsed New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s move to ban the sale of all sugar-sweetened beverages over 16 ounces in restaurants and other eateries.

Given the stridency with which the Rudd Center targets all sugary beverages, it is unclear where the Center would draw the line between a “specific beverage that may pose a public health risk” eligible for Prohibition and licit drinks. And this suggests that it finds all limits up to and including total sugar-sweetened beverage Prohibition to be potential possibilities. Certainly, it gives the lie to the Rudd Center’s positioning of a “penny-per-ounce” tax as a “small price.”

Jumping to Conclusions

Rudd Center researchers have also expressed contempt for democratic restraints on bureaucracy. Pomeranz wrote in the American Journal of Public Health, “If an agency’s position conflicts with the political position of elected officials in a jurisdiction, those officials can obstruct agency activity.” In other words, bureaucratic edicts are presumed to be valid while representatives of the people are mere roadblocks.

Brownell wrote in the Journal of the American Medical Association that those policies should be enacted before all the evidence is available. Arguing on behalf of restaurant calorie labeling, the effectiveness of which is highly disputed, he wrote:

For some of the most important public health problems today, society does not have the luxury to await scientific certainty.

Editors’ Note: We put much thought into the matter of raising Brownell’s weight problems in this article. We feel it is justified because of his contradictory positions that while his own weight gain was caused by his own decisions, specifically his own choice to overeat, the “food environment” is responsible for the weight gain of others.

Gegax Family Foundation

Tom Gegax, a Minnesotan who sold his $200 million company Tires Plus to Firestone in 2000, established this foundation. The Center for Science in the Public Interest recently rewarded Gegax for his frequent generosity with a seat on its Board of Directors.

We can sue anywhere we want to and we will.

Center for Science in the Public Interest Litigation attorney Steve Gardner at the 2004 PHAI conference

Marion Nestle

Former board member, Center for Science in the Public Interest; Chair, New York University Department of Nutrition and Food Studies; author, Food Politics and Safe Food

Michael Jacobson

President and Co-founder, Center for Science in the Public Interest; National Council member, Farm Animal Reform Movement; Former employee, (Ralph Nader’s) Center for Study of Responsive Law