ERIC SCHLOSSER, NY Times Op Ed

THE migrant farm workers who harvest tomatoes in South Florida have one of the nation’s most backbreaking jobs. For 10 to 12 hours a day, they pick tomatoes by hand, earning a piece-rate of about 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket. During a typical day each migrant picks, carries and unloads two tons of tomatoes. For their efforts, this holiday season many of them are about to get a 40 percent pay cut.

Florida’s tomato growers have long faced pressure to reduce operating costs; one way to do that is to keep migrant wages as low as possible. Although some of the pressure has come from increased competition with Mexican growers, most of it has been forcefully applied by the largest purchaser of Florida tomatoes: American fast food chains that want millions of pounds of cheap tomatoes as a garnish for their hamburgers, tacos and salads.

In 2005, Florida tomato pickers gained their first significant pay raise since the late 1970s when Taco Bell ended a consumer boycott by agreeing to pay an extra penny per pound for its tomatoes, with the extra cent going directly to the farm workers. Last April, McDonald’s agreed to a similar arrangement, increasing the wages of its tomato pickers to about 77 cents per bucket. But Burger King, whose headquarters are in Florida, has adamantly refused to pay the extra penny — and its refusal has encouraged tomato growers to cancel the deals already struck with Taco Bell and McDonald’s.

This month the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, representing 90 percent of the state’s growers, announced that it will not allow any of its members to collect the extra penny for farm workers. Reggie Brown, the executive vice president of the group, described the surcharge for poor migrants as “pretty much near un-American.”

Migrant farm laborers have long been among America’s most impoverished workers. Perhaps 80 percent of the migrants in Florida are illegal immigrants and thus especially vulnerable to abuse. During the past decade, the United States Justice Department has prosecuted half a dozen cases of slavery among farm workers in Florida. Migrants have been driven into debt, forced to work for nothing and kept in chained trailers at night. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers — a farm worker alliance based in Immokalee, Fla. — has done a heroic job improving the lives of migrants in the state, investigating slavery cases and negotiating the penny-per-pound surcharge with fast food chains.

Now the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange has threatened a fine of $100,000 for any grower who accepts an extra penny per pound for migrant wages. The organization claims that such a surcharge would violate “federal and state laws related to antitrust, labor and racketeering.” It has not explained how that extra penny would break those laws; nor has it explained why other surcharges routinely imposed by the growers (for things like higher fuel costs) are perfectly legal.

The prominent role that Burger King has played in rescinding the pay raise offers a spectacle of yuletide greed worthy of Charles Dickens. Burger King has justified its behavior by claiming that it has no control over the labor practices of its suppliers. “Florida growers have a right to run their businesses how they see fit,” a Burger King spokesman told The St. Petersburg Times.

Yet the company has adopted a far more activist approach when the issue is the well-being of livestock. In March, Burger King announced strict new rules on how its meatpacking suppliers should treat chickens and hogs. As for human rights abuses, Burger King has suggested that if the poor farm workers of southern Florida need more money, they should apply for jobs at its restaurants.

Three private equity firms — Bain Capital, the Texas Pacific Group and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners — control most of Burger King’s stock. Last year, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd C. Blankfein, earned the largest annual bonus in Wall Street history, and this year he stands to receive an even larger one. Goldman Sachs has served its investors well lately, avoiding the subprime mortgage meltdown and, according to Business Week, doubling the value of its Burger King investment within three years.

Telling Burger King to pay an extra penny for tomatoes and provide a decent wage to migrant workers would hardly bankrupt the company. Indeed, it would cost Burger King only $250,000 a year. At Goldman Sachs, that sort of money shouldn’t be too hard to find. In 2006, the bonuses of the top 12 Goldman Sachs executives exceeded $200 million — more than twice as much money as all of the roughly 10,000 tomato pickers in southern Florida earned that year. Now Mr. Blankfein should find a way to share some of his company’s good fortune with the workers at the bottom of the food chain.

Eric Schlosser is the author of “Fast Food Nation” and “Reefer Madness.”

A study published in the December Journal of the American Dietetic Association suggests that healthy foods not only cost more than unhealthy ones, but they also are more prone to inflation, the New York Times reports. Researchers from the University of Washington determined that a diet composed of unhealthy foods would cost $3.52 per day, while a diet composed of nutritious foods would cost $36.32 per day. These estimates are based on a 2,000-calorie daily intake, as recommended for adults by federal guidelines. The study authors believe that their findings may help explain the disproportionately high rate of obesity among low income populations. To assess the cost of a healthy diet, the researchers compared the prices of 370 products sold at supermarkets in Seattle, and calculated each item’s cost per 1,000 calories. The results indicated that unhealthy, energy-dense foods cost an average of $1.76 per 1,000 calories, and that low-energy, nutritious foods cost $18.16 per 1,000 calories. They also determined that the price of nutritious, low-calorie foods increased by 19.5 percent across the two-year study period, while the price of high-calorie unhealthy foods dropped by 1.8 percent. Lead author Adam Drewnowski, director of the center for public health nutrition at the University of Washington, added that the high cost of nutritious foods indicates the need to address the economic barriers to healthy living. He said that healthy foods, and produce in particular, are “rapidly becoming luxury goods” (Parker-Pope, New York Times, 12/5/07 [registration required]; Monsivais and Drewnowski, Journal of the American Dietetic Association, December 2007 [subscription required]).

A new survey reveals that many parents of overweight or obese children in the U.S. fail to recognize their children’s weight status, making them less likely to promote healthier diet and physical activity habits at home, United Press International reports. To evaluate how accurately parents perceive their children’s weight status, researchers working with the University of Michigan’s C.S. Mott Children’s Hospital National Poll on Children’s Health surveyed 2,060 adults online. They found that parents’ estimates of their children’s weight suggested that 25 percent of children in 2007 were obese or overweight. However, data from national studies that directly assessed children’s body mass indices indicate that, in fact, 35 percent of children ages 6 to 17 are obese or overweight. In addition, only 7 percent of survey respondents who have obese children ages 6 to 11 reported that they were very concerned about their children’s weight, while 46 percent of parents who have obese children ages 12 to 17 reported being very concerned. More than 40 percent of respondents with obese children ages 6 to 11 said their children were “about the right weight.” Based on this data, the poll’s director concludes that parents are underestimating their children’s weight, overestimating their height or both, and suggests that this may hamper the effectiveness of community and school efforts to curb obesity. He notes, however, that 84 percent of respondents indicated that it is very important for physicians to address obesity during routine check-ups. This signifies that health care providers could play a pivotal role in helping parents recognize children who have an unhealthy weight status and advising them on appropriate interventions (United Press International, 12/11/07; University of Michigan release, 12/10/07).

A study published in the December issue of Public Health Nutrition suggests that elementary schools can help students increase their fruit and vegetable consumption by offering a salad bar at lunchtime, United Press International reports. Using questionnaires completed before the intervention in 1998 and after the intervention in 2000, the researchers determined that participating children in grades 2 through 5 increased their produce consumption from 2.97 to 4.09 times daily during the study period. Researchers from the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) surveyed 337 students at three Los Angeles (L.A.) elementary schools participating in the federal lunch program and a local salad bar initiative. The initiative, which was developed by L.A. Unified School District food services and Occidental College in L.A., provides schools with a salad bar and includes nutritional education components, such as school assemblies, food-related art projects and farm visits. The introduction of the salad bar also correlated with a significant decline in students’ caloric, cholesterol, saturated fat and total fat intake. Lead author Dr. Wendy Slusser concluded that “children will indeed eat more fruits and vegetables if offered in an appetizing and accessible manner.” To better understand this dynamic, she suggested that future studies examine how well parents understand lunch menu changes and why girls are more likely than boys to frequent the salad bar (United Press International, 12/7/07; UCLA release, 12/7/07; Slusser, Public Health Nutrition, December 2007 [subscription required]).

A study to be published in next month’s American Journal of Preventive Medicine suggests that increasing the amount of play time and access to inexpensive fitness equipment could help boost physical activity among young children, USA Today reports. In an analysis of 20 North Carolina preschools researcher Diane Ward, of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill’s School of Public Health, found that providing more time for free play was the simplest and most affordable strategy for increasing fitness among children. Ward also found that preschools could bolster children’s physical activity levels by increasing the availability of portable, simple playground equipment such as hula hoops, and by training preschool staff to promote physical activity. Much to her surprise, the data also suggested that students at preschools with computers, televisions and videos had higher physical activity levels. Ward and the other researchers added that the finding likely reflects the schools’ economic state, suggesting that schools with resources for expensive technology may also be equipped to spend more on staff training and fitness equipment (Rubin, USA Today, 12/10/07).

A study in the December issue of Pediatrics suggests that repeatedly exposing infants to fruits and vegetables may increase their propensity to eat and enjoy those foods, HealthDay reports. To evaluate how babies develop food preferences, researchers from the Monell Chemical Senses Center in Philadelphia studied 45 infants from age 4 to 8 months. Forty-four percent of the infants were breastfed. The participants, who had been weaned to cereal but had minimal experience eating fruits and vegetables, were divided into two groups. The first group ate green beans at home for eight consecutive days and the second ate green beans and peaches across that period. Researchers observed the infants’ acceptance of foods at the center for two days before and after the trial, measured how much the babies ate, and surveyed mothers about their eating habits during and after pregnancy. Breastfed babies ate more peaches than formula-fed babies and made fewer negative faces, likely because breastfed babies had been exposed to the flavor through their mothers, according to the authors. They add that, in general, lactating mothers ate more fruits than other mothers. The researchers did not observe a difference in green bean intake between breast- and bottle-fed infants during the trial and found that both formula-feeding and breastfeeding mothers consumed fewer green beans than recommended. Still, the authors note that, after eight days of repeated exposure to the vegetable, babies’ green bean consumption rose from roughly 2 ounces to more than 3 ounces per serving. Peach consumption, meanwhile, did not increase because peaches were served after the green beans when babies were likely no longer hungry. In light of the findings, the researchers suggest that repeated exposure to healthy foods can help babies accept and enjoy those items. In addition, they note that “breastfeeding confers an advantage in initial acceptance of a food, but only if mothers eat the food regularly” (Doheny, HealthDay/Yahoo! News, 12/3/07; Forestell and Mennella, Pediatrics, December 2007 [subscription required]).

By Margo K. Wootan (Center for Science in the Public Interest) and Susan K. Neely (President and CEO, American Beverage Association) TheHill.com

It isn’t often that a lead industry group and a consumer watchdog group advocate for legislation together in Washington. But whatever our other differences, we agree that the country needs strong, national school-nutrition standards. Now, we urge the Senate to join with the hundred health and education groups and dozen food and beverage companies working to improve nutrition in our schools.

Sens. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska), Tom Carper (D-Del.) and John Cornyn (R-Texas) plan to offer an amendment to the farm bill to update the nutrition standards for foods sold out of vending machines, school stores and a la carte in school cafeterias. The proposed standards would limit school beverages to water, low-fat milk and juice in elementary and middle schools. In high schools, those beverages and low-calorie drinks could be sold, plus sports drinks near the gym. The amendment would also set standards for calories, fats, salt and sugars, and ensure that school foods provide key vitamins and minerals.

Schools are special places where we can teach our children how to have a healthy lifestyle through good nutrition and physical activity. That is why parents and health groups want improvements in school foods. The school nutrition amendment has the support of over 100 health and education groups, including the American Medical Association, American Dietetic Association, American Public Health Association, American Dental Association, American Federation of Teachers, American Association of School Administrators, and the National PTA.

The beverage industry — including Coca-Cola, PepsiCo and Cadbury Schweppes — is among the many food and beverage companies supporting this amendment. Others include Nestle, Mars, Frito-Lay, General Mills, McCain Foods, Dannon, National Milk Producers Federation, and International Dairy Foods Association.

Congress should not leave the full burden of improving school foods and childhood obesity to localities. In addition to creating a patchwork of disparate standards throughout the country, leaving school foods entirely to local control means continuing to rely on disco-era national standards that no longer make sense.

One policy is not the sole answer to addressing childhood obesity. We all have a role to play – including parents, health professionals, governments, and corporate America.

Harkin-Murkowski-Carper-Cornyn is bipartisan, as senators from all over the country have heard from parents in favor of healthy school foods. And, schools are finding that they can maintain much-needed revenues selling healthier options.

Given the sky-high obesity rates, the time to act is now. If our two organizations can come together for national school nutrition standards, so should the Senate. We hope Senators will support this amendment to improve school foods and help reduce childhood obesity.

Washington

Not Surprisingly, Watchdogs Give Fast-Feeder’s Play Failing Marks

By Emily Bryson York

CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — McDonald’s has found a nifty way to reach kids even as TV ad options toward the demographic shrink: Advertise on report cards.

The Golden Arches picked up the $1,600 cost of printing report-card jackets for the 2007-2008 school year in Seminole County, Fla., in exchange for a Happy Meal coupon on the card’s cover. With 27,000 elementary school kids taking their report-card jackets home to be signed three or four times a year, that’s less than 2 cents per impression.

Children who earn all A’s and B’s, have two or fewer absences or exhibit good behavior are entitled to a free happy meal at a local McDonald’s — so long as they present their report card.

A ‘new low’
Naturally, that’s riled some consumer groups. “Lots of companies advertise directly in schools, but I think McDonald’s has taken this to an all new low by advertising on report cards,” said Susan Linn, director of the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. “It bypasses parents and targets children directly, [telling them] that doing well in school should be rewarded by a happy meal.”

Regina Klaers, spokeswoman for the school district, said the report cards have contained some form of advertisement for the last decade. Until this year, Pizza Hut sponsored the printing. Ms. Klaers said when the company decided to pull out this year, the district shopped the sponsorship around. She added that only one parent has ever complained about the jackets.

“My daughter worked so hard to get good grades this term and now she believes she is entitled to a prize from McDonald’s,” Susan Pagan, an Orlando parent, said in a press release distributed by the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. “And now I’m the bad guy because I had to explain that our family does not eat at fast-food chains.”

Michele Simon, author of “Appetite for Profit: How the Food Industry Undermines our Health and How to Fight Back,” said that the school district is “selling kids’ health for chump change.”

“They should be embarrassed,” she said. “If you’re going to sell out kids’ health you might as well get something good for it.”

What’s more, Ms. Simon said, the program seems to fly in the face of the fast-feeder’s recent rhetoric about healthful eating. “It basically shows when you get down to it, how corporations are doing everything they can to keep their brands in front of kids’ eyeballs,” she said. “And the insidiousness of this is it’s infiltrating an official document from a public school.”

Recent health initiative
Last summer, McDonald’s joined the Better Business Bureau’s Children’s Food and Advertising Initiative. Participants, including Kraft Foods, General Mills and Burger King, have agreed to limit advertising to children under 12 and focus on better-for-you options. The reductions were to have been apparent by January 2008. The McDonald’s sponsorship will carry through the end of this school year.

Based on recent tweaks, the caloric and fat content of Happy Meals can vary widely. While a meal with a cheeseburger, fries and soda has 660 calories and 25 grams of fat, a white-meat chicken-nugget meal with apple dippers, caramel sauce and milk has 375 calories and 13.5 grams of fat.

William Whitman, spokesman for McDonald’s USA, pointed out that children — and their parents — have a choice. “McDonald’s has a longstanding and rich heritage of supporting education and academic excellence,” he said. “McDonald’s does not advertise in schools. However, we continue to support education initiatives in the communities we serve.”

Ms. Linn said that food rewards for academic performance is still a controversial concept.

Yet it’s got a long history. Pizza Hut’s “Book It” program, in which elementary and preschool children who meet monthly reading goals are entitled to a free one-topping personal pizza each month, is 12 years old. The elementary program alone has nearly 1 million U.S. classrooms participating.

By Rob Stein
Washington Post Staff Writer

Being overweight as a child significantly increases the risk for heart disease in adulthood as early as age 25, according to a large new study that provides the most powerful evidence yet that the obesity epidemic is spawning a generation prone to serious health problems later in life.

The study, of more than 276,000 Danish children, found that those who were overweight when they were 7 to 13 years old were much more likely to develop heart disease between the ages of 25 and 71 — even those who were just a little chubby as kids, and possibly regardless of whether they lost the weight when they grew up.

“This is incredibly important,” said Jennifer L. Baker of the Institute of Preventive Medicine in Copenhagen, who led the research, being published today in the New England Journal of Medicine. “This is the first study to convincingly show that excess childhood weight is associated with heart disease in adulthood, or with any significant health problem in adulthood.”

The study was published with an analysis of U.S. health statistics that projects teenage obesity will raise the nation’s rate of heart disease by at least 16 percent by the year 2035, causing more than 100,000 additional cases.

“This offers a frightening glimpse of what we have in store,” said David S. Ludwig of Harvard Medical School, who wrote an editorial accompanying the studies. “The epidemic of childhood obesity is not a cosmetic problem. It can have profound long-term consequences for adult illness and death.”

The proportion of U.S. children who are overweight has tripled since 1976 and now totals more than 9 million. The sharp rise has already caused a jump in children developing Type 2 diabetes, which used to be known as adult-onset diabetes because it occurred almost exclusively among adults. Children are also increasingly being diagnosed with high blood pressure and cholesterol, which raised fears they will be more likely to develop heart disease — the nation’s leading cause of death.

Previous studies had produced mixed results. “Although studies have hinted there may be an association, none has been able to confirm it,” Baker said. They didn’t have the power to show the association.”

Baker and her colleagues analyzed information collected about the height and weight of 276,835 Danish schoolchildren between 1955 and 1960 and scoured hospital records from between 1977 and 2001 to see which of them went on to be hospitalized for heart problems as adults.

The risk increased with any amount of excess weight in childhood, the researchers found.

“Even a few extra pounds increases the risk,” Baker said. “That’s the very frightening message from our results.”

For example, a 4-foot-1-inch boy who weighed about 61 pounds at age 7 faced a 12 percent increased risk of developing heart disease between the ages of 5 and 71, compared with a similar boy who was at the normal weight of about 52 pounds.

The greatest increased risk, however, was for the heaviest older children, the researchers found.

For example, a 5-foot-1-inch boy who weighed 121 pounds at age 13 had a 34 percent greater risk compared with a boy of the same height and age who had a normal weight of 96 1/2 pounds. The risk was 51 percent higher if the boy weighed 132 1/2 pounds.

The risk was significantly lower for those who were overweight at age 7 but not at age 13, indicating that a child who can lose excess weight while still young, and remain at a normal weight, can reduce the extra risk substantially.

“This gives us hope,” Baker said. “This really suggests that if an intervention occurs during this short period of time to help a child attain and maintain a normal weight, the risk of heart disease could be reduced.”

Because the researchers did not have data on the subjects’ adult weight, they could not definitively determine whether the increased risk was due to the effects of being overweight when young or because overweight children are more likely to become overweight adults.

“We speculate that it’s the early exposure,” Baker said. “It’s plausible that because these heavy children have these risk factors and are exposed to them early in life and continue to be exposed to them, that leads an increased risk in heart disease.”

In the second study, Kirsten Bibbins-Domingo of the University of California at San Francisco and colleagues used federal statistics from the year 2000 and other data to project that by the time today’s adolescents turn 35 in 2020, up to 37 percent of men and 44 percent of women will be obese, resulting in an additional 100,000 cases of heart disease by 2035.
Bibbins-Domingo said the projections would have been even higher if the analysis had included the Danish data.

“We took a very conservative approach,” she said.

Melinda Sothern, an expert on childhood obesity at Louisiana State University in New Orleans, said the findings are disturbing because they suggest not only that overweight children experience more disease and disability in childhood but also that many are also destined to be more sickly young adults.

“Overweight children are already losing their childhood. They can’t do the same types of activities as healthy-weight children,” she said. “Now they will lose their early adulthood as well.”

Ludwig likened the childhood obesity epidemic to the threat from global warming, saying that even though hard evidence is just now emerging about the consequences of the threat, society should act more aggressively to counter the trend.

“We don’t have all the data yet. But by the time all the data comes in it’s going to be too late,” Ludwig said. “You don’t want to see the water rising on the Potomac before deciding that global warming is a problem. We need national policies to address childhood obesity, too.”

By MIKE STOBBE, AP Medical Writer

More U.S. adults are getting physical — or at least that’s what they’re telling researchers.

A national telephone survey found the percentage of women who report regular physical activity rose to about 47 percent in 2005, up from 43 percent in 2001.

The percentage of men reporting regular exertion rose to about 50 percent, from 48 percent.

The small but significant increases are considered good news, but also seem a little perplexing: U.S. obesity rates are not declining, and there are indicators that some weight-related conditions — such as heart disease — are getting worse in some adults.

Recent increases in physical activity may not yet be affecting some health indicators, said Teresa Moore, an associate professor of exercise science at the University of South Carolina.

Or perhaps some people are exercising more but not taking other important steps, added Moore, who was not involved in the research.

“You could be out raking leaves, but if you’re eating a high-fat, poor-quality diet, you may still be aggravating the problem,” she said.

The survey was done by researchers at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It is being published this week in Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, a CDC publication.

The researchers drew their data from surveys in 2001 and 2005 of noninstitutionalized adults who had landline telephones. About 205,000 people answered questions in the 2001 survey, and 356,000 in 2005.

People in the survey were asked about their physical activity in a usual week in their non-working hours. One question asked about moderate activities such as brisk walking or gardening. Another asked about vigorous activities such as running or heavy yard work.

Respondents were considered physically active if they had at least 30 minutes of moderate activity five or more days a week, or 20 minutes of vigorous activity three or more days a week.

Along racial lines, reported activity rates were highest among whites and lowest among blacks.

As for education level, college graduates exercised the most, and people without a high school education were the least active, the researchers found.

Other studies haven’t shown overall exercise rates as high as 50 percent, said Julie Schwartz, a dietitian and fitness expert at Atlanta’s Emory Healthcare hospital system.

The new report differed from another recent government survey that found leisure-time physical activity decreased in men and remained static for women from 2000 to 2005.

People often do not accurately recall how much physical activity they actually did, Moore said.