I went to a co-worker’s office at work and she had a McDonald’s bag on her desk and was eating dinner. She told me she stops at McDonald’s almost every day at least once. I didn’t ask her if she knows that makes her a super heavy user. Remember the teenage girls about ten years ago that sued McDonald’s because they were obese (Pelman vs McDonalds, or The McFat Lawsuit)? A McDonald’s marketing executive testified that the company’s advertising specifically targeted “Heavy Users,” to try to get them to visit McDonald’s more than twenty times per month and become Super Heavy Users.
The McFat lawsuit was the inspiration for the movie Super Size Me. In that movie, Morgan Spurlock compared food industry marketing to cigarette marketing. The marketing strategies (along with huge profit margins and the disregard for health) are similar in part because some food companies are owned by cigarette companies: Phillip Morris owns the Kraft brands, R. J. Reynolds own Nabisco.
People have a choice in what they eat, just like they can decide whether or not they want to smoke. And the food companies “will increase the range of their marketing targets to children, urban minorities, and people in developing countries, whether or not the products displace more nutritious foods in the diet or add unnecessary calories,” and they’ll also promote minimally nutritious products and overeating in general.[1]
Until children are old enough to understand the difference between being sold something by a corporate advertising (or at school) and being educated about food, they’re going to have to trust their parents, teachers, and school administrators to educate them without, or at least beyond, the influence of the food industry.
The patterns of eating at home and school are important – for all ages. One doughnut probably won’t hurt someone, but a pattern of eating them will have negative effects. Getting French fries as a side with lunch at a restaurant when you weren’t expecting them isn’t going to be detrimental, but having them often with dinner or in the school lunch line is a different matter. Luckily we are now getting into a pattern of eating real food, and when we stay with it for life, we’ll never become heavy users of anything that leads to disease.
Now back to the blueberries I picked last weekend; I finally had time to make something with them.
Blueberry Crisp
4 C fresh blueberries
2 T flour
2 T brown sugar
½ C oats
½ C brown sugar
¼ C flour
¼ C butter
½ t cinnamon
½ t nutmeg
Preheat oven to 375. Mix the berries with the 2 tablespoons each of flour and brown sugar, and put them into an 8” square sprayed baking pan or a 2 qt casserole dish. Mix the oats, brown sugar, flour, cinnamon, and nutmeg and cut in the cold butter. Sprinkle the topping over the berries and bake for 30 minutes.
I also sprinkled 3 T of pecans over the top. You can use any kind of nuts you like. Mine looks a bit overdone because I was distracted in the back yard.
[1] Food Politics: How the Food Industry Influences Nutrition and Health, Marion Nestle, University of California Press, 2013, pg 362.
