Center for Science in the Public Interest

Nanny-Statist CSPI Sues to Ban Happy Meals at McDonald’s

by Hans Bader on December 17, 2010 · 9 comments

in Health and Illness, Legal, Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Regulation, Sanctimony

An ill-informed left-wing group, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, is suing McDonald’s in California to ban toys from Happy Meals. It is bringing a class-action lawsuit on behalf of “an activist employed by the California government to advocate the ingestion of vegetables, though some pains seem to have been taken to obscure this connection,” abetted by the gullible liberal media, which continue to depict her as just a “random” California mom.

San Francisco earlier banned Happy Meals, even though the meals in San Francisco’s own public schools are less healthy than at McDonald’s.

Why is the plaintiff in the suit against McDonald’s suing? She claims that “[b]ecause of McDonald’s marketing, her daughter has frequently pestered her into purchasing Happy Meals, thereby spending money on a product she would not otherwise have purchased,” and that “when she said no, her kids became disagreeable” and “pouted.”  If that’s a basis for suing, then, as Walter Olson notes, “McDonald’s isn’t the only company that should worry. Other kids pout because parents won’t get them 800-piece Lego sets, Madame Alexander dolls and Disney World vacations. Are those companies going to be liable too?”

The Center for Science in the Public Interest is the left-wing group that has ignorantly disparaged “normal food items such as baked potatoes, hamburgers, pizza, pork chops, and bacon as unhealthy. Never mind that a baked potato has only 100 calories, gives you 30 percent of your day’s supply of vitamin C (more than a banana), some protein, and many important minerals.”

People claim that McDonald’s makes poor people fat by selling them cheap greasy food, but its customers aren’t that poor (even so-called “poor” people in America have significant disposable income, which is why they often pay $3.69 for a Big Mac, when they could easily buy a McDonald’s double-cheeseburger that’s almost as big and has as much meat for a mere $1.19, even in “poor” places like the inner city).  And its food isn’t particularly fatty: a Big Mac or a Quarter Pounder is a lot leaner and healthier than many dishes people cook at home like Quiche Lorraine.  I am not poor, and I periodically feed my 3-year old daughter cheeseburgers or double-cheeseburgers without being nagged to do so (although she certainly enjoys them).

New fast food restaurants were recently banned in South Los Angeles, based on a kooky “food apartheid” claim by the Los Angeles City Council.  Never mind that baked goods are a bigger source of calories for kids than fast-food items like pizza, and that some people lose weight eating at McDonald’s, like me, Soso Whaley, and a Richmond man who lost 86 pounds.  A court recently blocked a class-action lawsuit against McDonald’s over obesity.

While liberal busybodies are suing McDonald’s, they are using federal funds to subsidize the opening of an International House of Pancakes in Washington, D.C., and the development of high-calorie foods to benefit agribusinesses.

Four Loko: Just How Potent is the Caffeinated Alcoholic Drink?

by Greg Conko on November 19, 2010

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk

Over the past few days, I’ve gotten plenty of angry e-mail from people critical of my defense of caffeinated alcoholic beverages like Four Loko, Joose, and Hard Wired.  Typical claims are that, “if it was [my] son or daughter ending up in emergency with a (sic) overdose of alcohol it wouldn’t be opposition to ban it,” and that “Your disgusting and your barely disguised right wing industry front is pathetic”.  My favorite, though, is, “I hope one of YOUR kids or family members dies from it, see how you feel.”

You might think that, boy, these products must really be awful to elicit that kind of a response — a message that the prohibitionists very definitely want you to get.  But just how potent IS a typical Alcohol-Energy Drink like Four Loko?  Let’s have a look.

A 23.5 oz can of Four Loko has 156 mg of caffeine.  You might think, “Wow!  What kind of caffeine-induced buzz is that going to get you?”  About the same as in a small/tall (8 oz cup) Starbucks coffee (160 mg).  By 7:30 this morning, I had already had nearly twice as much caffeine from my daily coffee.  The prohibitionists also like to point out that a 23.5 oz can of Four Loko has twice the caffeine as a can of Red Bull (76 mg).  But what they neglect to say is that Red Bull comes in 8.2 oz cans, which means that they’re just 1/3 the size and have about 50 percent more caffeine per unit volume.

Of course, there’s also the alcohol.  Four Loko is 12 percent alcohol by volume, which amounts to the equivalent of four to four-and-a-half typical American-style pilsner beers, such as Budweiser, Coors, and Miller, with approximate 4.8 to 5 ABV.  Still, ounce for ounce, you get about 50 percent more caffeine and about the same amount of alcohol in a vodka and Red Bull cocktail (8.2 oz of Red Bull plus a 1.5 oz shot of 80 proof spirits).  And you get about three times as much caffeine and about the same amount of alcohol in a cup of Irish coffee made by mixing a tall Starbucks coffee with a 1.5 oz shot of 80 proof spirits.

In order to conclude that AEDs are worse, you have to buy the notion that your typical partying teenager or young adult would stop at just one or two vodka and Red Bulls.  But actual observation of the wild college partier or young professional in his natural setting indicates that that’s a pretty far-fetched assumption.  So, it’s not remotely clear that there is anything uniquely unsafe about AEDs.  Nor do I believe that a ban on AEDs will do anything at all to stem the genuine problem of alcohol abuse among teenagers and young adults.  Indeed, to the extent that some AED consumers may revert to the vodka and Red Bull alternative, the AED ban could have negative public health consequences because the far higher level of caffeine in those self-mixed or bartender-mixed cocktails would be more likely to mask the effects of intoxication.

Perhaps more serious, in my view, is the fact that many of the activist organizations intimately involved with the movement to ban AEDs (led by the Center for Science in the Public Interest) began this fight to regulate caffeine, long before there was an AED market, by attacking non-alcoholic energy drinks like Jolt Cola, Red Bull, Monster, and Rock Star.  They’ve even been highly critical of Starbucks coffee for its caffeine content.  And the exact same legal rationale that the FDA used to ban AEDs (i.e., that FDA has not approved caffeine used as a food additive as GRAS for any use but in “cola type drinks,” making the addition of caffeine to malt beverages presumptively unsafe) could just as easily be applied to non-alcoholic energy drinks.  I fear, and with good reason I would argue, that we haven’t seen the last of FDA’s enforcement activity against caffeinated beverages.

Image credit: The Wisest Wizards’ flickr photostream.

Frivolous Lawsuit Against Denny’s Over Salty Food

by Hans Bader on August 4, 2009

in Legal, Personal Liberty, Precaution & Risk, Sanctimony

Denny’s has never claimed that it serves only health-food, and nutrition facts about its food are available on its web site.

But that hasn’t stopped the notoriously-unreliable Center for Science in the Public Interest from bringing a frivolous lawsuit against Denny’s over its food, claiming that it is defrauding the public by serving food that has more than a day’s supply of sodium. This lawsuit, known as DeBenedetto v. Denny’s, was filed on July 23 in Middlesex County, New Jersey. Hopefully, the judge will impose sanctions on CSPI’s lawyers for bringing this suit.

At the heart of CSPI’s complaint are its unfounded assumptions that (a) all restaurants imply that their food “has no more sodium than a meal at other restaurants,” and (b) that a typical restaurant’s food has no more salt than a person should consume in a day, such that a restaurant’s food doesn’t “contain more sodium than a person should consume in a day.”

Neither assumption makes any sense. Many common food items in grocery stores have more than a day’s supply of salt. One V-8 has nearly half a day’s supply of salt. Many frozen dinners have more than a day’s supply of salt. Why would anyone expect restaurant fare to be healthier? (Many expensive, snobby, high-brow restaurants serve saltier food than what Denny’s serves inexpensively and quickly to America’s working-class and middle-class people.) There is no limit on who can be sued if this suit were to succeed.

Moreover, expecting all restaurants to have less than or exactly equal to the average restaurant’s salt content is as unrealistic as harboring the Lake Wobegon fantasy that all children are above average. Some cuisines are just saltier than others.

If this assumption were accepted, it would be a one-way ratchet that would force all restaurants to steadily reduce their salt content to constantly remain at or below the average of their competitors in salt content. Food would become as bland as cardboard.

And, yet, these are the delusions harbored in CSPI’s court complaint, which contains the following paragraphs:

“48. Plaintiff and New Jersey Consumers have purchased and consumed Denny’s meals without knowing about the presence of excessive amounts of sodium. Plaintiff and New Jersey Consumers reasonably assume that a meal at Denny’s has no more sodium than a meal at other restaurants. As detailed above, this assumption is reasonable, but incorrect, because Denny’s hides the truth about its high sodium levels.
49. The omission of the information that certain meals at Denny’s contain more sodium than a person should consume in an entire day – and that some people should consume in a few days – is misleading. That conduct violates the rights of the Plaintiff and New Jersey Consumers protected by the CFA.”

How could consumers assume anything of the sort? How could they not taste the salt in the food?

My wife likes Denny’s, especially its club sandwiches, and its reasonable prices. When she first immigrated to America, Denny’s was one of the few restaurants she could ever afford to eat at, given her working-class roots. She was well aware that what she ordered was salty. A little extra salt in restaurant food is not a problem for most people, unless, perhaps, they not only have health problems aggravated by sodium, but also are so lazy that, despite those problems, they nevertheless eat out all the time rather than cooking their own meals, even though they could save money by cooking their own meals, as I did when I was younger and had little money to spend.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) is one of the most unreliable sources of nutritional information, having once taught that trans fats were safer than saturated fat.

It has helped to blur the distinction between unhealthy and normal foods over the years, by denigrating normal food items such as baked potatoes, hamburgers, pizza, pork chops, and bacon as unhealthy. Never mind that a baked potato has only 100 calories, gives you 30 percent of your day’s supply of vitamin C (more than a banana), some protein, and many important minerals — and that potatoes are so cheap that even a person of modest means can afford them. The potato saved generations of impoverished Irish, German, and Russian farmers from starvation and diseases related to nutritional deficiencies. (By the way, I lost 10 pounts while working at McDonalds during Summer of 1988, during a 10-week period in which I subsisted largely on the hamburgers I ate for free as an employee).

CSPI’s list last year of eight supposedly awful restaurant foods both blurred the distinction between healthy and unhealthy foods, and shows ignorance of basic math. Along with some disgusting concoctions that were loaded with fat and have few nutrients, its list includes a couple dishes that are fairly healthy, such as the Twice-Baked Lasagna with Meatballs at Romano’s Macaroni Grill.

CSPI faulted the Twice-Baked Lasagna for having twice the fat of most other restaurant lasagnas. But that’s only natural, because it’s a relatively large lasagna — nearly 1360 calories. It also has much more protein than most restaurant lasagnas.

CSPI pointed to no evidence that the Twice-Baked Lasagna has a significantly unhealthier ratio than the typical restaurant lasagna, either in terms of the ratio of fat to protein, or fat to total calories. The Twice-Baked Lasagna has about your daily fat intake, but it also gives you about half your daily calorie needs. It’s a large lasagna, not an unhealthy lasagna. If you were hungry, wouldn’t you rather be served a large lasagna than a small one?

Stupid and Evil Soda Tax

by Angela Logomasini on May 14, 2009 · 1 comment

in Nanny State, Personal Liberty

Nanny statists are, apparently, equal opportunity hacks. Activists on the left and their legislative team players are not only going after the bottled water “sin industry.” They are also increasing the pressure for regulations on other beverages, seeking to slap a federal 3 cent tax on beverages containing sugar. Where will it end?

Look at this debate between Jeff Stier of the American Council on Science and Health and Michael Wolff of Vanity Fair. Wolff basically calls any American who is over-weight a needless drain on America’s health care system. Should they be punished with a nanny state tax?  He says: “Why not?”

Why not? Because, as Stier points out,  we live in a free society in which individuals should be responsible for themselves. And who seriously believes that 3 cents is going to matter a hill of beans? However, it will aggregate into a good chunk of change to enrich government bureaucrats who will probably do lots more stupid and possibly evil things. Let’s face it. This money won’t fix our health care system which suffers from excessive government regulations and runaway entitlement programs. They will probably use it for more misguided programs.

Before Stier was cut off by the rude talking heads he was up against, he pointed out better solutions for Americans suffering with some excess on their waistlines, one of which included allowing technologies to develop that will help reduce caloric intake. Ironically, nanny statists have fought and undermined these solutions.

For example, for decades they condemned the sugar substitute saccharin by saying it was a carcinogen based on questionable science. After scaring people away from this calorie saver for decades, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention finally announced that all the “science” previously touted was wrong. Saccharin isn’t a carcinogen after all.

Moreover, nanny statists with the ironic name Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) fought the release of olestra, a fat substitute that allows people to enjoy a few extra chips without all that many extra calories. A side effect for a small segment of people might be gastrointestinal distress, such as soft stools. But the product would not have this impact on everyone. Ironically, as the American Council on Science and Health notes in one publication, various studies showed that these effects were no higher (about 2.5 percent of consumers in test groups) than they were for chips made with regular oils. Nonetheless, CSPI undermined the marketing of this product and was able to win regulations that limit its use. It is only used for snack foods, but if the Food and Drug Administration allowed it, olestra could be used in a wide-range of valuable applications. Unfortunately, nanny statists would rather find an excuse to tax us.

Source for photo: Katharine Moriarty