Striving4Zen

When did Pepsi become an advocate for health?

The valuable local food lessons of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma seem not to have registered at the ADA—or, at least, not enough to have supplanted its need to court corporate sponsors for its annual conference.

One of those sponsors, the pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), recently released Alli, the first over-the-counter diet pill to gain approval from the Food & Drug Administration and promoted at the Food & Nutrition Conference & Expo. GSK launched a “Meet Alli” tour last year in malls nationwide, where dietitians offered consultation and free Alli pills for six months to weight-conscious shoppers.

Why, then, was a diet pill promoted at the ADA’s annual keynote event when the most important factor in maintaining a healthy lifestyle is to eat right? And how did “the nation’s food and nutrition experts” stray from promoting the fruits, vegetables and whole grains featured on the covers of their books? Could it be related to the more than $10,000 that GSK contributed to ADA as a corporate sponsor within the last year? ADA’s other corporate sponsors include Unilever, National Dairy Council, PepsiCo, Kellogg’s, General Mills, Mars Inc. and Abbott Nutrition.

Hunger and Environmental Nutrition (HEN), a group of dietitians who are concerned about public health within the ADA that has more than 900 members, focuses on nutritious foods and clean water in the context of a secure and sustainable environment. One evening during the conference, HEN held a “Food and Film Feastival” in Philadelphia’s historic Reading Terminal Market where it served locally grown, seasonal foods, as well as micro-brewed beer, while showing guests films about food and the struggles today’s farmers face to stay in business.

Helen Costello, the past chair of HEN, said she felt stuck between a rock and a hard place in the debate over local and organic foods. “This is an issue of food safety, when 22 million pounds of beef are recalled as a symptom of a consolidated food industry. One affected animal ruins the whole lot. But it’s complicated because our culture wants cheap food.

“More ADA members would like more local food,” she said, “but the organization takes a conservative view overall, adopting the mindset that organics can’t feed the world.”

HEN chair and executive director of the Sustainable Farming Association of Minnesota, Mary Jo Forbord said that convincing the ADA to promote local food systems over corporate agribusiness is more of a marathon than a sprint. Forbord, a fifth-generation Minnesota farmer, said that currently, “There’s no public discourse. Consumers and citizens ought to write the Farm Bill, because we all pay for the system we have in place. It determines what we will eat, how our landscapes will be used, and who will reap the benefits. Agricultural policy needs to line up with food policy, with goal of health in the broad sense—for people, communities and ecosystems.”

For the time being, though, HEN will take baby steps like holding local-food festivals in lieu of launching an all-out, food-throwing mutiny against the ADA. Eventually, HEN hopes, ag-biotech, big pharma and fast-food representatives dressed in dietitians’ clothing will have no place at the table.

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Labels: ADA, American Dietetic Association, HEN, Michael Pollan, Oxford Health Alliance, Pepsi, politics