INTERVIEW SAFE FOOD An Interview with Michael Jacobson Michael Jacobson, Executive Director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, is a scientist and an author as well as a persistent advocate of safer food standards. Jacobson has a Ph.D. in microbiology and his work includes both lobbying and education efforts. He has authored and co-authored several books including Marketing Booze to Blacks and The Booze Merchants. MULTINATIONAL MONITOR: What is the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI)? JACOBSON: Well, CSPI is a consumer advocacy organization that is working on a wide variety of issues. CSPI was founded in 1971 by three scientists. We worked on different issues, from air pollution, to nutrition to corporate influences on science museum and then in the late 70s we narrowed down largely to foods and nutrition. In the summer of 1981, I had an intern and asked him to look at the cost and causes of different health problems, so we looked at diabetes, tooth decay, cancer, heart disease, alcohol and tobacco and I was flabbergasted when I saw that alcohol was at the top of the list. Alcohol costs America something like $110 billion dollars a year, twice as much as cancer and heart disease. The reason that it is so expensive to the nation is not that it kills more people than tobacco. Alcohol contributes to about 100,000 deaths a year, tobacco to about 350-450,000 deaths. But alcohol ruins people's entire lives, so that they're not productive members of society. Roughly half of everything is related to alcohol, the spouse abuse the robberies and so on--auto accidents. It's extremely pervasive. It lowers inhibitions, men go off half cocked and beat their wives and batter their children. Or they have a drink to bolster their confidence before they go out and mug somebody, so it affects other people as well as the drinker. I started to look into it further, and one of the first things was obvious, I turned on the television and saw these ads with never a warning; you look at a label on a can of beer and it doesn't even say that it contains alcohol. Then we looked at the federal taxes on alcoholic beverages. They had not been raised since 1951, since Truman was president. Then we looked at other groups and we saw that the National Council on Alcoholism (NCA) wasn't doing anything in terms of national policies to prevent alcoholism problems, especially labor, advertising and taxes. And then we discovered that three of the NCA's seven member executive committee were representatives of the beer industry, the wine industry, and the liquor industry. Each had a slot. And we talked to the NCA and began writing articles, developed a project that has as its goals to prevent or reduce alcohol problems. We will never have zero alcohol problems, but we could go a long way toward reducing them. The single most influential way to effect drinking is to raise the price of drinking through higher taxes. MM: What specifically would you like to see done to address alcohol problems? JACOBSON: The first thing is to correct for all the inflation that incurred since the last tax increase. Taxes pretty much kept up with inflation until 1951, partly because excise taxes helped finance World War II and the Korean War. That's why alcohol taxes were increased and income taxes went down; tax revenue went down during the depression so they raised money with alcohol. Since 1951, taxes have not kept up with inflation. The 1989 dollar is worth about 22 cents in 1951 terms, so the value of the tax to the federal government is much less. Another thing to change is that liquor is taxed 17 times higher than wine and four times higher than beer for the same amount of alcohol and that doesn't make sense. Equalize the taxes on the basis of the alcohol content and then correct for at least some of the inflation. We have suggested going back to 1973 or so when most the inflation occurred, during the oil crisis. The federal tax would end up being much higher than 25 cents a drink. Right now the liquor tax is 11 cents and beer tax 2.5 cents and wine tax 0.6 cents per drink. We say raise those to 25 cents. MM: How has the alcoholic beverage industry responded to your criticisms? JACOBSON: They acknowledge that alcohol is related to problems in our society. They say let's blame the drinker, it's not the product it's the consumer. Those consumers need education and they need treatment and that will take care of things. It certainly would help if it were done on a reasonable magnitude, but meanwhile the industry is spending $2 billion dollars a year on promoting the sale of their products. MM: What would you like to see the industry, itself, doing to address alcohol problems? JACOBSON: The kind of thing we would like to see happen would be balancing the advertising with health messages. For every ad there should be a health message with information about alcohol and maybe some support for non-drinkers like a message saying, "If you have a party be sure to have a lot of non-alcoholic drinks because a lot of people don't drink these days." MM: Which companies are most opposed to your proposals? JACOBSON: It depends on the issue. On advertising I put the broadcasters up at the top. On taxes, the beer industry has been the most vocal opponent, the wine industry has been a proponent, but it is a relatively small industry. The liquor industry has been less outspoken partly because they are furious that their taxes are so much higher than the beer and wine. There was only one major tax increase since 1951 and that was in 1984 when the liquor tax was increased, not beer and wine. Beer, wine and liquor stand shoulder to shoulder and then the wine and beer industries knife the liquor industry in the back. Also the liquor industry certainly deserves praise for not advertising on radio and television. It's just an accepted gentlemen's agreement, social contract almost, that liquor not be advertised on radio and television. Every once in a while we discover a company advertising on radio and television and we generate some publicity and manage to stop the advertising. We have done that four to five times. So, here the liquor industry has the highest taxes and is not able to make use of the most powerful advertising medium. That isn't fair, but there is not much that they can do about it because the distributors and liquor stores have said that if any liquor company advocates higher taxes on beer and wine, they will not carry their products." In one instance a major liquor company started talking about equalization and distributors said "If you want your products distributed, you had better shut up." MM: What happened in Congress with the labelling requirement? JACOBSON: Senator Strom Thurmond, R-NC, has been advocating for wine labels for 20 years. He has really been a persistent advocate, with very little support in Congress. This past time around we worked with the NCA which, in the early eighties, got rid of the beer, wine and liquor industry people, and since have been wonderful supporters of higher taxes and proof labelling. They were liberated when they changed their board makeup. We and the NCA organized a major coalition to support Senator Thurmond to do a fair amount of lobbying and publicity to show that there is support for this. So several things came together, Senator Thurmond's continued interest, and I think he was spurred in part by the pressure of some of his friends in the tobacco industry. His industry has been attacked whereas liquor which is every bit as much of a problem is getting away scot free. Also the public concern about health has been increasing. And then what made the whole thing acceptable to the liquor industry were these product liability law suits which are cropping up in the courts; there are half a dozen around the country. None have been won by a victim yet, but the industry saw that the tobacco industry was getting relief using cigarette warning labels as a defense on the product liability safety. The liquor industry thought that maybe they should make this gesture. MM: So the alcohol industry did not oppose it? JACOBSON: At some point they agreed. There was some compromise. Senator Thurmond's bill proposed five rotating warnings. One was on drunk driving, one on mixing alcohol with other drugs, another on birth defects, another on addictiveness and a final one on cancer and heart disease. Senator Ford, D-KY, was the liquor industry's person in the Senate and he said the liquor industry wouldn't go along with that. He told Thurmond that they wanted just one notice. Senator Thurmond said well, I'll go along with you on one notice but it has got to have more than one piece of information, we want two: birth defects and drunk driving. We're disappointed that addictiveness, cancer and heart disease aren't in there. The drunk driving is almost a throw away. Who doesn't know that drunk driving is related to alcohol? I think that's just extra garbage but it's obviously a popular item. The law requires Congress to re-examine this in two years and that would be a time to press for alternating ones, maybe get a third or fourth. MM: What about restricting advertising? JACOBSON: There is very little chance of getting a total ban or equal time. The broadcasters are too powerful, not to mention the other allies: the distributors, the wholesalers, the brewers, the vintners, the bottlemakers, the unions--they all oppose it. So it is unlikely that we're going to get that very soon. We might get some nibbling around the edges, such as a ban on celebrities, actors or sports figures, sports motif where it's just inappropriate to connect drinking to activity that requires such a high level of skill. That would be just one of the things, another thing would be warning labels, at least in print advertising. MM: So they are not required to show the warning in their advertisements? JACOBSON: That's right not in advertising at all. The Surgeon General's report is a wonderful endorsement for all the things that we have been advocating, on advertising and taxation and that report will give credibility to these prevention-oriented notions. It will make it a lot safer for politicians to say you have to do this or that but I don't underestimate the power of the industry. We only got six co-sponsors in the House for that equal-time measure. Broadcasters get almost a $1 billion dollar a year from alcoholic beverage advertisements. So, they don't want to lose that . . . It's only 5 percent of their revenue. They wouldn't be hurting, what would happen is competition for air time would increase, so rates might go down a little or stabilize. They put the small minority stations up in their defense, saying "These are the stations that would be hurt first. If you ban beer advertising, these stations would just go out of business, and we care about these minority stations." Many of the beer and liquor companies have supported United Negro College Fund, NAACP and a wide variety of minority organizations so it is no accident that minority organizations don't speak out in favor of policies that would reduce drinking. The industry is really cultivating these markets with two goals: one is to sell more and the other is to neutralize their potential opposition. They have been quite successful in both. The beer companies have enough marketing money to target practically every niche in the population--Michelob is aimed at Yuppies, Budweiser is aimed at the average guy, I guess, Busch beer or Old Milwaukee are aimed at a little lower socio-economic group. MM: Which companies would you say are the most manipulative? JACOBSON: I would say the big ones are the worst because they do so much more advertising than any of the others. They also use their advertising muscle--their advertising power suppresses competition. Companies like Stroh's and Coors complain that they can't get access to the World Series or to that kind of thing unless they're sponsoring Colorado rodeos, which they do a hell of a lot of but advertising has a monopoly of power. The big companies are in general the strongest lobbyists, sometimes though they hide behind the small companies saying, "Look at this poor family winery that has been in existence since 1849. If you raise the tax they'll go out of business." As if the big companies are not wiping out the small ones right and left for other reasons. So, it is not big or small, many of them play a role. MM: How prevalent is industry-funded research and how much of a problem do you think that it is? JACOBSON: In the 70s we did a study called "Feeding at the Company Trough," which looked at links between nutrition and food science professors in the food and chemical industries-- food and food additive industries. You would see all these universities departments and professors getting money from General Mills, Proctor and Gamble, different chemical companies and these professors are always defending the industry. They speak at industry conventions; if an industry runs into some public relations problem they call upon these professors to defend them. And we have seen this to some extent with the booze industry also. They fund research that, and they hire as consultants professors who defend the booze industry. MM: Is this research funded by individual companies or by industry-wide groups? JACOBSON: It is somewhat more by industry group. Money reaffirms and encourages a professor's original thinking, so if a professor happened to think that booze wasn't very important or addictive, a tax wouldn't reduce drinking or that advertising doesn't have much effect, then the industry funds that professor. Although sometimes the industry might buy off a critic. But even neutral people may not get funding. Industry money will go to people who speak out on behalf of industry. It is a "chicken and egg" thing here; by the time anybody realizes it, the professor is a vocal spokesperson and if you can trace back you see that they have been receiving grants, maybe since they were in graduate school. But there are some people, like Professor David Pickman of Washington University, who speaks at all the industry conventions, is always interviewed in their trade publications and always says that advertising has nothing to do with consumption. I think it is just ridiculous, lousy research. I am not saying that industry or professors are always wrong, sometimes they do make good points. My feeling about the renting or the purchasing of professors is let them hire themselves out to alcohol companies, but whenever they speak out in public they should let journalists and the public know of their potential conflict of interest. Because in a way you do want industry to have access to good advice. But these professors should realize that in return for the money, there is a price to pay: the appearance of a conflict of interest. MM: What are the major chemical threats in food? JACOBSON: Well, the biggest problems lie in basic nutritional value. Cholesterol, sodium, sugar--those things are a hundred times more important in terms of health, than all the additives and pesticides put together. Fatty, salty diet contributes to diabetes, obesity, hypertension, heart disease, certain cancers, hundreds of thousands of deaths. Pesticides and food additives contribute, I would guess to thousands of deaths and that is just a guess and nobody has a solid figure, but that order of magnitude. And also food born illnesses kill about 10,000 people a year. That is an FDA estimate. MM: Has CSPI's campaign for the reform of nutritional labelling on food made any progress? JACOBSON: Yes. Nutrition labelling now appears on somewhat less than half of all processed foods. But those labels usually leave out some of the key information like cholesterol, saturated fat, sugar and dietary fiber. We would also like to see something on the front of package labels. It would be a very simple clear summary of the food's nutritional value. The food label is impossible to read. All that small print is wonderful for FDA inspectors and nutritionists, but to the average person, I think it is terribly confusing and meaningless. MM: How have food producers reacted? JACOBSON: Total resistance to the front of the label where we suggest having a red, yellow and green code to give information on sugar, fat, calories and fiber. If the food is good it is green, if it is bad it will be red and yellow will be somewhere in between. No company wants to have four red marks on the front of their label, understandably. MM: Are organically grown products starting to put a dent in the traditional food market? JACOBSON: Not a dent, but they are making an appearance. It's just showing up at supermarkets. The Wall Street Journal had an article about a month or so ago, estimating that organic farming accounts for 1 percent of agriculture now, and may increase to 9 percent in 10 years. MM: What kinds of things is CSPI doing specifically to address minority health concerns? JACOBSON: We are focusing most of our efforts on alcohol, tobacco and nutrition. Some of our efforts will be much more general in encouraging health awareness, among blacks and hispanics in particular and also among organizations who represent Blacks and Hispanics. Maybe try to get some health campaign on Spanish language television. One of the things that I have found to be troubling was that malt liquor is high octane beer and its targeted almost exclusively to Blacks and Hispanics. That should be stopped and the alcohol content should be restricted to the alcohol content in beer so that you are not encouraging people with more alcohol problems to get drunk faster. MM: What do you think of the new ad campaigns that promote food as healthy, for example the current rage for products containing oat bran? JACOBSON: It is interesting, 10 years ago there was very little health or nutrition information in food advertising. A key document came out in 1980, Dietary Guidelines for Americans, published by USDA and Department of Health and Human Services, saying there is too much fat, cholesterol, sugar, sodium. That made it safe for the food industry to advertise food's nutritional virtue. To get industry's advertising muscle to promote nutritious foods is like getting the auto industry to promote cars that don't guzzle gas or cars with airbags. It is nice to take advantage of that self-interest but unfortunately far too many ads are really dishonest or misleading. We have stopped at least a dozen deceptive advertising campaigns. Some of them are just jokes, the coffee industry advertises that coffee helps calm yourself down, that made Saturday Live. The beef industry says beef gives strength; we said wrong, beef gives heart disease and what gives strength is exercise. McDonald's advertised that their foods fit in with the dietary guidelines for Americans to eat more fruits and vegetables. That was a joke with the McDonald lettuce and tomato on their Big Mac. Their milkshake has milk, their french fries have potatoes and so on but it is basically salty, greasy, high caloric food, so that was pulled. Arby's said our food is very lean; it's true that roast beef is lean but they add so much bacon, cheese and dressing that it ends up high in fat. Kraft advertised that its cheese has all of the nutrition that is in five ounces of milk; it is more like three ounces of milk. Sara Lee came up with cheese cake it calls "lite," but it has as many calories as regular cheesecake does. Land O' Lakes butter had on the label that butter is great source of Vitamin A to ensure smooth skin but if it is any way to get Vitamin A it is not with pure butter. Campbell Soup paid a $350,000 fine for deceptive soup ads, Proctor and Gamble paid $350,000 to California for deceptive orange drink ads. New York State required McDonald's not just to stop those ads but to disclose the nutritional value of the ingredients in their foods. That was a big break through because McDonald's and other companies had been refusing to do that and as soon they did it in New York, we went to all the other Attorney Generals and said "Aren't your citizens deserving of the same information," and then it became national and other companies disclosed the information as well.