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Appetite for Profit: How the food industry undermines our health and how to fight back

Appetite for Profit: How the food industry undermines our health and how to fight back
By Michele Simon

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Product Description

The United States is currently embroiled in a national debate over the growing public health crisis caused by poor diet. People are starting to ask who is to blame and how can we fix the problem, especially among children. Major food companies are responding with a massive public relations campaign. These companies, including McDonald's, Coca-Cola, Kraft, and General Mills, are increasingly on the defensive. In response, they pretend to sell healthier food and otherwise position themselves as "part of the solution." Yet they continue to lobby against commonsense nutrition policies. Appetite for Profit exposes this hypocrisy and explains how to fight back by offering reliable resources. Readers will learn how to spot the PR and how to organize to improve food in schools and elsewhere. For the first time, author Michele Simon explains why we cannot trust food corporations to "do the right thing." She describes the local battles of going up against the powerful food lobbies and offers a comprehensive guide to the public relations, front groups, and lobbying tactics that food companies employ to trick the American public. Simon also provides an entertaining glossary that explains corporate rhetoric, including phrases like "better-for-you foods" and "frivolous lawsuit."

Product Details

  • Amazon Sales Rank: #140011 in Books
  • Published on: 2006-10-19
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 416 pages

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Simon, a health policy expert and law professor, skewers the food industry for undermining the health of Americans with "nutrient deficient factory made pseudofoods." In lawyerly fashion, she explains the ABCs of the business imperative of "Big Food" (Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods and McDonald's, among many others): make short-term profit without regard to the product's nutritional value or societal effects. Permissible tactics, she says, include false advertising, sham "healthy" food initiatives and co-opting the government, press and academia. Simon also argues that food-industry advocates use front groups to attack critics and spread misinformation about nutritional needs. Simon also chastises her fellow food activists for applauding all "steps in the right direction," no matter how inadequate; the press for its passive publication of scientifically dubious industry statements; and the government for abandoning effective regulation of the food industry. Her case made, Simon offers a host of suggestions and a manual-like set of directions to parents and other food activists on how to work with legislatures, school boards and the media to create a "just food system" that is "sustainable, affordable, accessible, and convenient." (Nov.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
America's fast-food purveyors, beverage industry, and processed-food manufacturers conspire with pliant government regulators to seduce a gullible populace into eating habits that ultimately lead to ill health. So Simon, a health-policy attorney, argues in this volume. Defending their own actions as preservation of people's right to choose, these corporations and the government agencies charged with monitoring them actually restrict consumers' range of choices. This hegemony, Simon contends, leads ineluctably to the present national plagues of obesity, heart disease, diabetes, and other nutrition-related sickness. Simon expresses particular outrage at how the beverage industry, which so often controls schoolhouse vending machines, has tried to restrict children's choices for break-time snacks and drinks. Among the more controversial recommendations that Simon makes, nutrition labeling of restaurant meals presupposes that chefs exercise more consistency than creativity. Simon also fears that concerns about obesity often misfocus on symptoms, not causes. Mark Knoblauch
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Michele Simon is a public health lawyer who has been working as a nutrition advocate since 1996, specializing in policy analysis and legal strategies.

She is the founder of the Center for Informed Food Choices and edits their newsletter, Informed Eating.

She has published numerous articles about such issues as the National School Lunch Program, organic standards, the USDA's dietary guidelines, veggie libel laws, genetically engineered foods, and banning obesity lawsuits. She lectures extensively, has appeared on numerous radio programs, and teaches Health Policy at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, where she also received her law degree. Michele obtained her master's degree in public health from Yale University.

Customer Reviews

Most interesting and eye-opening book about foods ever5
This book is amazing if you are interested in food and health and want to know everything about how the food industry tries to get you to eat more, and unhealthy just because they want to make money off of you.
Even with a background in Nutrition this books gives a lot of real life examples of how sneaky the food industry is. the author really knows what she's talking about and she has done her homework. A fast read, and so interesting, you might want to read it twice

Good info3
Good to know stuff about the power of the food industry in the USA and how it protects its interests while putting our health at risk.

A great resource for those who want to protect themselves and their families5
This book will teach you how to spot the PR, how to not be fooled, and how to organize, for example, to improve school food. The government and large corporations have a lot of big bucks at stake. They do not care about your health. They care about profits. This is true in all business.

So you, the consumer, must learn what is hype (PR) and what is real. You need to protect yourself and your family.

This book gives you a comprehensive guide to the public relations, front groups, and lobbying tactics that food companies employ to trick the American public.

Highly recommended.