You’re a government health regulator seated at a poker table surrounded by the CEOs of the largest American food companies. Scanning the table’s perimeter, you’re looking for weakness. Nabisco has his shades on so his eyes can tell no tales. Kraft and General Mills only return your gaze with the same blank stare. But wait. Out of the corner of your eye you see Pepsi’s palms are moist as he goes to call. Player after player folds and now the hand is back to you. You bluff with false confidence and raise, though weakly. Pepsi takes the bait, calls, and goes all in. The dealer calls for your hands. Your three tens lie on the velvet in triumph over Pepsi’s pair of aces. Taking your coat and standing up from the beaten table you break your gamblers resolve, when for a split second, you crack a smirk through your stone face. As you stride towards the cashier’s box with chips in tow, Pepsi realizes he’s seen the same smirk every weekend for the past twenty years, every time you’ve beaten Marlboro.
Even though the preceding situation sounds like something out of a Vegas flick, it is not un-similar to the disjointed tango between the government and Pepsi. Big tobacco’s peg has been knocked so low that they are now playing in the dirt. Pepsi and other food producers of questionable health benefit seem to have become next on the government’s chopping block.
Pepsi has become nervous enough to start making claims. They will remove every vending machine that serves high sugar drinks from k-12 schools before 2012. They will reduce the salt, sugar and fat content by 25% from their brands before 2020. They will begin to offer healthier options and they will stop targeting younger consumers in their advertising. Pepsi knows the popular modern trend is towards healthy nutritional choices and they are quietly distancing themselves from their rationalizing and deflecting public relations policies of the 90s. Bygone days when Pepsi’s marketing campaigns referred to their snacks as "fun for you."
Is Pepsi in an evangelical crusade against the added trans fats and sugars in their products? Nope. Pepsi is in the government’s and the angry public’s sights as America’s new poor health scapegoat, and Pepsi wants to become the next health campaign whipping boy like the Marlboro man wants to spend his afternoon accessorizing at Louis Vuitton.
The issue here is that Pepsi’s stuck between looming government and social pressures to provide healthier options and the reality that in many cases their best customers do not want those options. “Fatty Boom-Boom” is a term you might’ve heard thrown around a locker room or two to reference people who consume a 24 pack of Pepsi a week and require a forklift to use the restroom. Pepsi has a slightly more affectionate yet equally creepy term for the boom-booms who also happen to be their best customers: “frequent users”.
So what happens when you alienate the “frequent users” to aim campaigns into the hipper, more educated, organic soy milk sipping, free-trade denim wearing hipsters? You get flops like "Tropicana Juice". A financial disaster compared to the launch of "New Coke" which fell on deaf ears and uninterested palates during the mid eighties. Other Pepsi ventures into healthy snacking have met a similar fate leading to the harsh realization that many if not most of nutritionally educated consumers have already found niche brands, are loyal to them and are unlikely to side with a giant that they already deem to have misaligned incentives.
Regardless of the outcomes between Pepsi and the government your humble narrator thinks we all deserve to know what’s what about the food we eat. Eating a Twinkie with HIGH FIBER!! plastered on the box would be akin to purchasing a 500,000 mile car off a used car lot because the salesman scribbled NEW TIRES!!GREAT DEAL!! on the windshield. As consumers most of us want to believe we can accept the manufacturer’s label’s claims. After all, the government regulates these claims don’t they? Wouldn’t it be wrong for the people who provide our food to be anything but honest? Let’s take a minute to wake up.
The company that sells you your white eggs and enriched bread is no different than the used car salesman offloading his lemons. Food, like any other industry is driven by revenues. What the public wants is what food companies will provide. If eggs produced using green energy are hot this week, egg companies will consume ten percent of their energy with windmills, now they’re green eggs. If eggs produced with extra vitamins are hot this week, egg companies will throw a handful of vitamin D on the chicken feed, now they’re vitamin eggs. This is sales and marketing 101.
Pepsi is here to stay for the indefinite future. Governments may always be about one step behind when it comes to protecting the nutritional welfare of an educated society. So take it upon yourself to slowly begin the process of regulating your own nutritional intake. And remember that no one is ever finished learning all there is to know, it is a lifelong process.
SIDEBAR
So what are us normal people who love to eat to do? I mean, we do have to eat… don’t we!? I can’t solve all of your problems, but I can teach you 5 fairly easy rules that could help your health immensely:
1. Avoid Trans Fat and High Fructose Corn Syrup - These manmade food additives where developed as cheap alternatives to natural fat and sugar. In one study it was found that 7 grams of trans fat per day, the amount found in a medium French fry, increased your chance of cardiac failure after a year’s worth of consumption by 50%.
2. Go Organic with your Animals - Organic foods aren’t a cure all, but what organic does mean is that those foods have not been raised or produced with antibiotics, hormones or carnivorous feed stocks. Switching your poultry, dairy, beef and other animal products to organic wherever possible can have great benefits to your health.
3. Don’t Drink the Fire Water, or the Sugar Water for that Matter - It has been proven that many obese Americans lose substantial amounts of weight when they substitute their high calorie drinks for low calorie substitutes. Good fill-ins for soda would be tea sweetened with stevia or a mixture of 100% fruit juice, sparkling water and a few drops of mint or lemon oil.
4. Learn the Glycemic Index - Merely changing your carbohydrate intake from bad ones such as donuts, to good ones such as granola cereal can help you stay healthier. Some good examples of quality carbohydrates are oatmeal, beans, lentils, brown rice and other whole grains. If you don’t feel like eating these things raw(which I will not blame you for) simply search for the ingredient followed by “recipe” in your search engine. You should be able to find several thousand to choose from instantly.
5. Cheat - It’s ok to go overboard every once and a while. As you start your new endeavor to eat healthier, vow that for three meals a week you’ll eat whatever you want. As long as you aren’t gorging and staying within the guidelines at every meal, a few meals a week where you don’t hold back is ok and can actually be beneficial for your body. Wherever possible cheat with organic ingredients.
The Economist's March 27th article entitled "Pepsi gets a Makeover,"
(1,200 words)
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