Dump the Junk

The diet-related public health crisis we face can be counted in declining life expectancy and in dollars (for example, the U.S. spends $200 billion annually in obesity-related healthcare costs), but it will be experienced as the physical pain of heart disease and cancer, as limbs and eyesight lost to diabetes, and as family members who are missing from holiday tables. A driving factor is the ballooning omnipresence of junk food and junk food marketing.

Multinational food and beverage companies currently spend billions every year on marketing, including at least $2 billion in marketing directly to children. This marketing is everywhere, and disproportionately targets communities of color.

Regulations on such marketing is scant, and the food and beverage industry has long wielded its political power to fight any regulation. Simultaneously, the production of many of their ingredients, and even their marketing practices, is highly subsidized. Yet the highly-processed junk food and sugary drinks – so heavily promoted in communities of color and to children – are driving a public health crisis through an epidemic of diet-related chronic diseases.

The predatory marketing tactics that these companies use to target children and communities of color must be stopped. We also recognize that we need to work with international partners and fight for multilateral regulatory and policy solutions so that corporations don’t continue employing these practices with impunity outside our borders.

• When developing the dietary guidelines, incorporate environmental sustainability as well as nutrition
• Require labels that identify key qualities of retail and quick service restaurant food and beverage items on-package and at point-of-sale
• Require visible warning labels for harmful food and beverage product
• Bring transparency to the politics behind the food economy, including corporate donations
• Bring transparency to industrial agriculture production, including emissions, pesticide and fertilizer use, mandatory checkoff programs, and crop insurance
  
• Require transparency in the seafood supply chain, from catching to processing and transportation
• End the undue influence that corporations have over public research
• Meet the full demand for farm/boat to school funding and extend the program’s reach to public schools, hospitals, prisons, tribal schools, and to include traditional foods and marginalized farmers, fishers, and ranchers