Coca-Cola wants to help fight obesity. Or so they say. Calling it “Coming Together,” their website boasts of their commitments. Yet their recently stated five priorities as a corporation speak primarily of company growth and don’t mention obesity — priorities very much in line with the hopes expressed by Coca-Cola’s chief marketing officer Joe Tripodi to CNBC back in November 2011: “We want to double our business in basically a decade.” Doubling sales is clearly an ambitious aim, which might help explain a recent European Coca-Cola Enterprises sales report that asked the question, “How do we motivate people to make soft drinks … part of their morning ritual in the same way as tea or coffee?”
PepsiCo wants to help, too. They, along with Coca-Cola, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group and the American Beverage Association, have signed up to reduce beverage calories consumed per person nationally by 20 percent by 2025. Of course, consumer trends already suggest beverage calories are going down, and I haven’t seen any mention from PepsiCo about them cancelling their $50 million dollar marketing deal with teen idol and international popstar Beyoncé.
[Read: Why Is Everyone Always Giving My Kids Junk Food? ]
And then there’s the Healthy Weight Commitment Foundation. They’re a food industry-funded coalition of more than 250 organizations including Big Soda, but also folks such as the Grocery Manufacturer’s Association, Kraft, General Mills, Nestlé, Kellogg’s, Mars and Unilever. If you’re American, the Foundation is likely teaching your children all about “energy balance” — as according to their own numbers, their energy balance 101 curriculum reaches 16.6 million U.S. students, including half of the entire nation’s pre-K through 5th grade student population. Among their many helpful lessons will be one that teaches kids that if they sprain their ankle, rather than choose less energy-in for “balance,” they should — despite their injury — “find other activities to increase energy out.”
The government’s helping too, no? I mean, the U.S. Congress determined that pizza was a vegetable, Canada abandoned the recommendations of their own industry inclusive trans-fat task force, and the British government promised not to impose and regulations on the food industry in exchange for footing the bill for the UK’s anti-obesity initiatives — these actions are all sure to help reduce the rates of diet and weight related non-communicable diseases, right?
If you think about it, none of this should surprise you. The fact of the matter is that the food industry’s job isn’t to protect your health, it’s to sell food and protect their brands. And the government? Their job is to get re-elected and to support their own mandates and political agendas, which at times will be made easier if industry interests are allowed to trump public health concerns.
While I think there will always be a role for raging against Big Food’s faceless machinations and for rallying self-absorbed governments for better national public policies, if you want to see a change you’re far more likely to affect it yourself by targeting people who actually care about you and your children — I call it guerrilla nutrition.
Start with the people who care the most — you! Have a look at your home’s health habits, and see what might be tweaked. Pick out your family’s worst product-based dinner (boxes, jars and the like) and swap it out for a purposefully produce-based home-cooked meal, put an end to candy in your children’s lootbags, give out passes to the local community centre in place of Halloween treats, and re-relegate eating out to be for special occasions only.
Next, fan out from your house and tackle local coaches and parents who contradict their caring for your kids by encouraging the consumption of sport drinks or post-game treats, reach out to your local PTAs and discuss the wisdom of fast-food fundraising and provide them with healthier fundraising suggestions, and call up your children’s camp directors and explore alternatives to the inevitable sugar mountain camps seem to serve up to our kids.
[Read: It’s Time to Put an End to Junk Food Fundraising .]
Given the rise of diet and weight related non-communicable diseases and their consequent costs both to individuals and society as a whole, I’ve no doubt that in time we will see formative change. But if we can enact change on the ground, from home to home, school to school, and local community to local community, maybe we can hasten it along by cultivating the attitudes required for both the food industry and governments to take nutrition and health-related public policy far more seriously.
To learn more about the realities and challenge of NCDs, please take a moment and have a look at NCDFree’s fantastic new campaign The Face of NCDs .
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Stop Waiting for Corporations and Governments to Help — the Case for Guerrilla Nutrition originally appeared on usnews.com
