The Influence of Labeling on Food Choices

We dine out six times a week and I am one of those guys who nearly always makes substitutions.  In my case it is to substitute more vegetables in place of starches and sugary stuff.

But according to the National Restaurant Association, 70% of diners customize their meals.  In part, this is the reason the NRA has long opposed nutritional labeling requirements on menus.

In July, the FDA issued nationwide requirements for labeling by December 1, 2016.  Unfortunately, the requirement only applies to food establishments that are part of a chain with 20 or more locations.

Of course the most common objection is that this will cost jobs.

This is also a claim that was made by many opposed to the Affordable Care Act, which required the labeling.  It is a reasonable caution that has now proven unfounded according to this chart in the Washington Post.

But with such limited application nutritional menu labeling won’t replace at least anytime soon the very popular food diary app MyFitnessPal (MFP) which cites medical studies finding that keeping a food journal doubles weight loss.

MFP has 85 million users now and has been acquired by Under Armour.

Many users synch it with activity trackers such as Fitbit, so last fall year when it was closing in on the 65 million mark, it conducted a study among 2,200 users in the United States and discovered the link between weight loss and friends.

It turns out that 44% prefer to keep their workouts private.  Of the 56% who prefer company 33% do it with a friend, 11% with a relative and 12% do it in a group exercise class (extroverts, I presume.)

Half noted that they would be inspired if their closest friend or relative lost 20 lbs.  Telling though is that one-in-six responded that they would react negatively with envy instead.

When it comes to fitness goals, negativity can be as viral as reinforcement can.  Many of those who are negative, the researcher noted, have given up that anything will ever work.  I would add that they don’t seem to want to make it work either.

These “haters” will be even more resentful as they order from a menu soon because nutritional information will lay bare to their friends and family the fact that their real problem is the food choices they make.

I felt this as a tall but heavy-set woman with ailing hips and/or knees who was taking her sweet time ordering in front of me at a Subway last week.

She interrupted her phone conversation to be sure the server put double meat on her foot-long as well as four full-length squirts of different sauces.

Had she consulted MFP, she would have probably seen that the sauces had as many calories as the entire sub.

She wasn’t going to be denied nor was she going to be rushed along which I suspect may be contributing to her weight and her disintegrating joints, a sense of entitlement she will take with her to the hospital as she drives healthcare costs up for others too.

MFP’s genius is that it makes you aware of tradeoffs but it can’t overcome denial and stubbornness yet.

Studies of restaurants posting nutritional information on menus show only a modest changes in the choices people make about the foods they eat although there is the argument that we all have a right to know what’s in our food.

But studies of another system, called Nutricate, which for several years has given restaurants the ability to print nutritional information as well as suggestions on receipts are much more promising.

Invented in 2006 by the founder of Silvergreens, Nutricate is much more than the smart receipts that push you to buy more and eat more by offering coupons which have a redemption rate of 3.5%.

Nutricate gives you a nutritional tally of what you order including subtracting or adding for substitutions as well as “did you knows” with information about more nutritional alternatives.

The result is not only cost-effective marketing for repeat customers but economists at the University of California at Santa Barbara found that by simplifying complex choices, Nutricate significantly changed people’s choices of what to order for the better.

All of this without reducing total sales I might add.

The researchers conclude that the reason the receipt approach works better than more complex menu approach is salience, much the way Netflix works by tracking preferences and making suggestions.

By this they mean that processing all of the information on a menu may cause some people cognitive overload while putting it on the receipt makes it more prominent.

At any rate, for those who are struggling with weight issues and food choices, note that solutions could be a close as your mobile device.

Taking Up The Slack

In case you missed it, North Carolina where I have lived for going on three decades just missed ranking in the top 10 states for couch potatoes.

We came in #6 for average minutes watching TV, just below the middle of the pack for least amount of exercise, #11 for watching daytime soap operas and, drum roll, #14 for love of Lazy-E-Boys.

As a whole, Tar Heels are #15 when it comes to thinking about frozen pizza and #19 in our love of fast food, but in the middle of the pack again in our love of video games.

That is just a sampling of the metrics used to develop the Couch Potato index.

Regionally, according to Roberto Ferman, a reporter for Wonkblog, the South dominates the nation when it comes to Couch Potatoes.

It’s probably the humidity but that doesn’t explain why we don’t make up for it during mild winters.

North Carolina comes in #15 overall in the analysis compiled from various sources by bloggers for Estately, an online real estate research site.

Most fascinating to me was the variation across the country in the number of fast food restaurants per capita and the linkages to measures for Lazy-E-Boys, obesity and lack of exercise.

For many years I ate, on average, more than a hamburger per day, especially after moving to North Carolina, so it was no wonder then when my doctor told me I needed to lose 20-30 pounds as part of a regimen to lower my triglycerides.

I’ve eaten three hamburgers in the past year, two when traveling.  In the mean time, the number ordered per American has reached 28 compared to the nearly 550 a year I used to contribute alone.

The Burgers “ordered-in-restaurants” market is double the size of the market for pizzas, which is why it was smart of the index to include frozen pizzas.

A few years before I retired in 2009, Durham, where I live, jumped into the “better-burger movement,” led by a great restaurant that existed here at the time called Starlu.

It, in turn, helped spawn an early food truck called Only Burger, now also a sit-down or order-to-go restaurant with two locations.

At the time, better burgers were less than 2% of the overall restaurant burger market.  Now, they are double that share even though the overall market for burgers in restaurants has grown by another $13.4 billion.

Obviously someone is take up my slack.

Food for Thought

Reading a new McKinsey analysis of the most effective ways to fight obesity made me remember that if it weren’t for an inability to metabolize sugar, I would probably be struggling with a weight problem, if not on my way up the first wrung of obesity.

The study quantifies the effectiveness of interventions including areas of personal responsibility as well as education and environmental factors such as labeling, portion control and subsidies and taxes, all of which have spawned a huge “sugar” lobby.

I first felt the hypoglycemic reaction that my body has to the levels of sugar in foods, mostly added, when I was 11 years old, going on 12 and weighed about 84 pounds on a 4’8” frame.

But it wasn’t fully diagnosed for another ten years when by that time I touched the scales at 150 pounds and nudging 6 foot tall.

I descended from a long line of “white food” eaters on both sides, who when they weren’t drawn to sweets and foods that quickly convert to sugar such as mashed potatoes, macaroni and milk, corn, fruit salad laced with whipped cream and bread, even bread and milk.

To my mom, who was a great cook having learned from her mother-in-law, even oatmeal wasn’t right without a layer of sugar across the top.  Maybe it is little wonder that my parents struggled with weight and sought comfort from these foods their entire lives.

Actually, our weight and happiness are on opposite “u” curves during our lives, one with the u bending upward and the other bending downward, but looking at how sugar affects the brain, they seem related.

Our relationship with food is apparently linked to both.

One of the interesting findings in the McKinsey analysis is that obesity is a condition shared now by 30% of the global population.  It is projected to increase to 41% by 2030, but already has the same economic drag as tobacco and armed conflict.

It is far more costly than alcoholism, for instance.

The interventions McKinsey finds most effective can lower obesity by 20% within a five year period when deployed together.

Portion control and reformulation of foods have the greatest impact followed by limiting access to high calorie foods, weight management programs and parental and school education.

A high-sugar tax can also play a role.

In the United States, obesity is the second most significant social burden.

In 1750, sugar consumption was about 3-4 kg or less per person.  It took off in the United States in the late 1800s and then skyrocketed about the time I was born.

About the time I retired five years ago, Americans were powering down 28 kg of “added” sugar alone or about 60 pounds per person.

The obesity epidemic is no surprise.

Normal weight, according to the McKinsey study means keeping the body mass index below 25.  My doctor tries to get me to stay below 19.  Overweight is between 25 and 29.

Obesity comes in three stages beginning at 30% and ranging to more than 40.

Those of us who are overweight push medical costs up 31%, and obesity, depending on the level, pushes costs up anywhere from 58% to 86%.  Click here for the latest pie chart showing where America’s $2.9 trillion health dollars go.

I’ve learned to limit my intake of added sugar to between 6 and 9 grams (about two teaspoons) per day and stay away from foods naturally high in sugar.

Still I am not deprived.  My diet averages around 30-40 grams a day.

One of the advantages to logging my meals, often vetting them in advance using an app called myfitnesspal, is being far more aware of foods high in sugar.

Whenever we eat breakfast at Bob Evans, I like the Border Scramble, substituting a fruit plate instead of potatoes and without bread.

But even without the fruit, that dish has 7 grams of sugar.  The fruit plate has another 13.  Way over my threshold and even with the protein involved risking where, for me anyway,a hypoglycemic reaction would kick in.

My sweet tooth is fed by two glasses of wine with dinner - only red - and on the more “minerally” side.  Each glass has only 1.8 grams of sugar each but is much weightier in calories overall.

But the apple a day I snack on later has 11 grams which is possibly why even when I was young, I learned to eat this fruit as my dessert after dinner, a time of day when any adverse reaction would occur only while I am asleep.

Also being certain to drink two quarts of water a day on top of the water in about 60 oz. of coffee is crucial in my case.  But my point is that even religiously avoiding foods with added sugar, I get a lot in my diet.

Obesity increases in countries along with prosperity.  In in the U.S., the CDC finds it at the same levels for men regardless of income level but in women it affects 42% of low income vs. 29% at high income levels.

This may give finger-waggers more ammunition to lecture the poor about personal responsibility, but it is clear the correlation is to only being able to afford or easily access unhealthy foods and eating leftovers while caregiving, I suspect.

This is another reason that making certain low income people have healthcare insurance is smart.  When it comes to healthcare costs we’re in this together when it comes to our pocketbook regardless of partisan leanings or feelings of superiority.

So whenever someone asks for the mashed potatoes to be passed during holiday meals, we need to be aware of just how incredibly powerful the “white food” lobby is in this country and give thanks if we are less impacted, but less judgmental of those who are.

New research shows that it is more than with fitness and caloric diary apps that smartphones are impacting the way we buy food.  A study shows that 79% of women alone now use their smartphones in stores.

Of those, 35% do it in grocery stores alone, 23% to check barcodes to learn more about products than may be revealed on labels.  By the way, the same percentage use GPS via smartphones to find the store greatly reducing any tiny remnant of rationale remaining for billboards.

I suspect, without my reactive hypersensitivity to blood sugar level, I would be among those judged.  I love mashed potatoes and not just because I’m from Idaho where it is patriotic or because “red states” are more prone to obesity.

Retirement agrees with me.  Although I seem to be getting shorter, I also dropped about 25 pounds (intentionally) over the past six months, more a credit to walking daily and cutting calories, not just a diet low in refined carbohydrates (smile.)

Now for some comic relief about the determination of the sugar lobby, click here to see John Oliver propose that all food labeling regarding sugar added be put in terms of “circus peanuts” (which have 5 grams each.)

Actually, a Gallup poll showing what Americans spent on average for this past Thanksgiving week reveals that it certainly isn’t peanuts nor is it just on food.

Happy Holidays!

Tweaking Parenting Style to Reduce Poverty

Keeping a promise made at the end of the essay posted yesterday, this follow-up reveals two fleeting encounters with stereotypes of my own, as well as a couple of studies brought to mind by a surprise stop along the way.

No matter who we are or the color of our skin or where we grew up or how tolerant and accepting we have become or think we are, we’re all bigoted in some way.  The trick is to catch ourselves.

For me, one of two fleeting glimpses occurred along U.S. Route 36 as Mugs and I crossed the Wind River Reservation last month on the stretch of slightly rolling hills in Wyoming that finger up between the Middle and Southern Rockies.

By the way, if you’re not into Walt Longmire novels, or the acclaimed TV series, a good non-fiction about the struggles between cultures there over the past hundred years is Geoffrey O’Gara’s lyrical and even-handed account in his book entitled, What You See In Clear Water.

Another of his books is one I’ve re-read on other cross-country trips since I retired from a four decade career in destination marketing.  I first read it in 1989 as I relocated from the Far West to Durham, North Carolina, and the author wrote while he was relocating from the east to Wyoming.

Entitled A Long Road Home: Journeys through America’s Present in search of America’s Past, it intersperses memoir and history with excerpts from the back roads travel guidebooks written during the Great Depression of the 1930s by writers employed by the WPA Federal Writers’ Project called the American Guide Series.

While I was tooling along at the maximum speed permitted on that stretch of the Reservation, a Native American rancher slowly pulled out in front of me without accelerating so while maintaining speed I simply signaled into the other lane to pass.

Suddenly the pickup feinted into my lane to block me and the driver laid on his horn while flipping me the bird.  My mind flashed a stereotype of Native American drivers (as well as farmers in Idaho) commonly held by ranchers where I grew up.

Then I could see in my rear view mirror that the rancher had pulled on the highway for only fifty feet or so to then turn back into his ranch via another road.

By the time Mugs and I settled into Casper for the night I was ready for a tall cool one at a steak place where another encounter reminded me that I, too, am subject to stereotypes.

Surrounding me suddenly in the bar area where I was eating, were members of a motorcycle gang called the Silent Sinners, many of whom were apparently returning from a big bike rally up in Sturgis, South Dakota, in that nook pointing into Montana and Wyoming.

The group is an offshoot of a branch of the Sons of Silence in Colorado and one of eight clubs linked by the Justice Department as conduits for criminal enterprises.  Turf for this group included Wyoming and northern Utah, but the overall reach of the Sons of Silence is across 12 states.

But the members around me that evening were congenial, kidding me about having grilled chicken and veggies in a steak place and for drinking red spirits rather than brown.  Later they acknowledged that they suspected I road motorcycles by the Harley emblem on my trailer hitch.

A friend of mine who lives on the west coast of Florida assumes that any neighborhood with a couple of motorcycle owners must be sketchy, stereotyping the 9% of Americans who do by lumping them with the 5%of riders who belong to outlaw gangs.

That night I caught a glimpse of both my own prejudice and being prejudiced against by others.

Early the next morning, Mugs and I set off across the roller coaster hills and dales of Wyoming rangeland that run along the Southern Rockies as they jut up from Laramie, while imagining hired guns for the cattlemen’s association riding north during the late 1880’s Wyoming Range War to attack immigrant settlers.

Soon we dropped down onto the flatter plains that run north through Denver and up past Cheyenne where we turned east down across the high plains of Nebraska, then across its Great Plains where my ancestors began their trek out to the Rockies in the 1840s.

At Lincoln on the western edge of the corn belt plains, we stopped for the night.  Running through my mind that day as things turned violent in Ferguson were two studies.

Pundits had been excusing the violence centered around the looting of 56 stores as an outgrowth of frustration over poverty but poor people are no more violent than other Americans, and maybe even less.

To the frustration of legitimate protestors, their activity had provided cover for criminals, just as research sociologists have long warned that petty crime and blight does, making poor neighborhoods victims of crime.

As I noted yesterday, nearly 4,000 African-American slaves had toiled in the county around the city of St. Louis, including what became Ferguson, in 1860 just before the Civil War.

I don’t know that any descendants of those slaves live there today.  It was predominately white until 1980.  But a 2010 study by researchers at the Institute for the Study of Labor found that even today in parts of counties such as this, the legacy of slavery is still manifest by economic inequality, especially the gap in education.

But the paper “Being Black Is Not A Risk Factor: A Strengths-Based Look At The State Of The Black Child” points to findings that support the idea that it is “being poor in general that is the real risk factor.”

Nearly half of “black children in families living below the poverty threshold live in areas where at least 30% of the residents have incomes below the poverty threshold.”

The ratio is 1-in-4 in Ferguson, MO, but more like 1-in-2 among African-Americans there and in similar places compared to 35% of blacks, 33% of Hispanics and 13% of whites nationwide. 

A number of white progressives as well as some African-Americans get very upset at references to poverty as cultural, perhaps because many assume that implies it is brought on by race.  But in my reading this is far too narrow a use of the term cultural.

When in his remarkable essay entitled, “Inconvenient Truths About Poverty,” conservative critic and columnist Joe Queenan, who himself grew up in poverty, references poverty as “rooted in interlocking self-fulfilling prophecies, he isn’t writing about race.

The next morning Mugs and I headed south to St. Joseph, Missouri, and then to avoid traffic and road construction in Kansas City and St Louise as well as the corridor between, we took a new route along much more scenic U.S. Route 36 to cross the Mississippi at Hannibal with plans to cut south to Nashville.

We stopped for gas at Chillicothe where in 1855, Reverend David White, a minister in the Christian church was run out of town on threat of lynching for preaching against slavery.  This was also the route Mormons had taken back to Illinois in 1839 when threatened with an extermination order by the governor.

Across the bridge we looked for a “Blue Highway” south to Paducha but turning too soon, the GPS took us back southwest through incredible Illinois countryside, back across the bridge at Louisiana, Mo and down scenic State Route 79.

At I-70 I headed west past St. Charles, taking the I-270 beltline to get around traffic and stopping for gas to get my bearings and find the best way back across the river and back on track.

Two elderly black gentlemen on each side of the pump in front of me were talking in loud voices although they were both agreeing with the rhetorical question, “why were those boys walking down the middle of the street anyway?”

Out of curiosity, I asked “Where is Ferguson anyway?” I was on my way in the store to get water and received a resounding chorus of, “Son, you just crossed over it.”

There is always a lot of finger-pointing in news reports about poverty, much of it inferring that police and teachers aren’t doing enough.  But rarely does the role of parenting get any play.  According to many studies, perhaps like me, none of us feel we are very good at it.

I remember reading a typology of parenting once that across all groups 32% of parents are “authoritative,” the ideal mix of demanding and responsive, 31% are negligent, 22% are permissive and 15% are authoritarian.

Again, it is not about race, but in a book I read about a decade ago entitled Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life, Dr. Annette Lareau reviewed research that studied the differences in parenting styles across races and socio-economics such as middle or working class and poor.

Lareau found that working class parents and those in poverty practiced what she called “natural growth parenting,” with children free to roam around unstructured. They seemed to feel that kids will soon have it tough enough.  They give orders but avoid too much interference.

Middle-class parents practice a style she calls “concerted cultivation” focused on coaching, teaching self-control, negotiation, understanding how to challenge authority and time management.

Both approaches have drawbacks.  As the saying goes, its also takes a village to raise a child.  The late Dr. John Hope Franklin, a friend and incredible African-American scholar, told stories about how neighbors would discipline him on his way home from school.

Franklin’s research was used in court desegregation classes.  He felt that black parents of his generation felt their children needed to excel, but many in the generation after desegregation mistakenly spent too much time trying to cushion life’s bumps.

He wouldn’t be surprised that a new study in Michigan found that minority parents were far less likely today to follow child restraint laws and guidelines when they drive, but might be to know that this was regardless of socio-economic status.

Dr. Lareau found that the different parenting styles of middle class and poor or working class parents may reinforce class-based inequality by reproducing it from one generation to the next.

She argued in her book that this distinction “arbitrates opportunity in America more powerfully than any other demographic characteristic including race.”

A recent study that correlates to self-regulation in childhood found its strongest link to parenting style, especially among low income children and males regardless of minority status, household composition and parental education.

A newly published study by Canadian researchers entitled, “In Praise of Demanding Parenting: The Effects of Parenting Style and Poverty on Obesity” finds parenting style significant regardless of age, sex, parental education, immigration status, family functioning score, birth order or maternal age.

Authoritarian parents risk self-esteem; permissive parenting risks regulator deficits.  Each parenting style has advantages and disadvantages but it is worth considering the role parents, families and neighborhoods can play in overcoming poverty.

Obesity’s Link to Roadside Billboards

Tiny Rhode Island, the state most deeply rooted in individual liberty, vigilantly guards the following policy, while North Carolina lawmakers are busy surrendering thousands of acres of roadside forest in a giveaway to out-of-state billboard companies:

"It is the policy of the State of Rhode Island that on land held in the public trust, no vegetation is to be removed for the purpose of increasing the visibility of any commercial property."

Tar Heels familiar with a constitutional amendment known as the Environmental Bill of Rights (p. 538) know that was meant to do same for North Carolina, and they are bewildered that lawmakers, if even aware it exists, seem in flippant disregard.

Many Republican lawmakers are oblivious, at best, to the opposition of 8-in-10 North Carolinians to cutting more trees for billboards including a ratio of 19-to-1 against among members of their party, revealing a glaring weakness in representative democracy.

Obviously, taking out thousands of acres of roadside trees has an effect on public health because it is scientifically proven that trees help to clean the air, purify water, cool surface temperatures, screen wind and particulates and sequester climate warming gases.

Now comes a new study revealing that the outdoor billboards for which they are being harvested are linked to obesity, where prevalent.  This is a costly condition self-reported by 36% percent of Americans including 30% of North Carolinians.

Is it possible that Rhode Island’s refusal to surrender roadside forests to billboards is part of the reason that state’s rate of obesity is lower than states such as North Carolina where lawmakers are gratuitously deforesting to make their views more effective?

An analysis performed a few years ago by RTI International, based in Durham, North Carolina where I live, calculated that obesity is burdening the economy with hidden costs of more than $150 billion annually while jacking up health insurance premiums across the board.

To put this “obesity” tax on the non-obese in perspective, it is nearly four times greater than the amount a House bill is intended to cut from the federal budget in hopes of pushing working American families off food stamps.

They apparently think this will force these families to find work that pays a livable wage even though the proportion of low wage jobs has ballooned to 4-in-10, more than double what was in 2009.

McDonalds touts environmental responsibility as one of its focus areas including “conserving and protecting natural resources.”  Yet, for a decade, the world’s largest global foodservice retailer has also been the number one user of outdoor billboards.

This makes that company a major enabler of deforestation by outdoor billboard companies along publically-owned roadsides, not to mention a company empowering visual blight in communities, where on average, restaurants depend on tourist appeal for a third of their revenue.

Corporations like McDonalds have excellent intentions when it comes to sustainability, but all too often they are undermined when their marketing divisions fail to connect the dots or feel exempt.

To be credible, marketing must be about “storydoing,” not just storytelling.  One thing marketing departments in companies such as McDonalds can do immediately to redeem themselves is to stop enabling desecration by using outdoor billboard companies.

Food and beverage businesses overall make up 1-in-4 of the top 100 businesses in terms of generating outdoor billboard revenue.

In the past decade fast food restaurants alone have doubled their use of outdoor billboards while casual dining restaurants have pulled back.  Just look at Cracker Barrel, which has touted using 1,500 billboards alone in the past but has now fallen from 5th to 14th place in use.

Slowly, foodservice businesses such as Cracker Barrel are moving to far less destructive mediums such as highway exit logo wayfinding signs.

Among fast food giants, only Wendy’s seems to have had second thoughts about billboard use.  During this same decade, not counting those used by its bottlers, Coca-Cola, rose from 40th to 9th in billboard use contributing to a tripling of childhood obesity in a generation.

Founded by a third generation restaurateur, Orlando-based Aaron Allen & Associates, a restaurant industry analyst and consultancy for both independent restaurants and chains, steers restaurants away from billboards and toward far more productive marketing vehicles.

From 1971 when tobacco advertising on television was banned, until the early 1990s, tobacco companies were by far the largest users of outdoor billboards.  Then, there too, tobacco encountered an uprising of public health considerations.

It was in 1992 that McDonalds ran its first outdoor billboard campaign as tobacco advertising on roadsides fell dramatically by 33% by 1994 and then was banned from outdoor advertising in a legal settlement with 46 states in 1999 including North Carolina and Rhode Island.

Leveraging fire-sale rates as the death knell for billboards grew louder, by 2002 McDonalds became the #1 user of outdoor billboards, keeping this obsolete advertising technology on life support, a standing the foodservice giant has retained into the current decade.

This, even though studies show less than 1% of consumers now use billboards to make decisions and the desecration they create turns off 7 consumers for every 1 who still find them useful.

Billboards are the bottom feeders of the advertising industry, which overall has fallen to where it now returns just 1/10th of its input in terms of what it costs to place.

It is clear many lawmakers in North Carolina are not connecting the dots between billboards and public health.  Or maybe special interest lobbying by billboard companies has made them tone deaf.

Personally, I prefer to believe that most lawmakers are well-intended but just don’t get it or they are outmaneuvered by a sneaky few who know exactly what they are doing and don’t care.

One thing is for certain, billboard companies operating in North Carolina are hollowing out the code of ethics of their own industry which calls for protection of children and respect for the environment.

As for North Carolinians, we seem stunned if not numbed to the crass overreaching of billboard companies in the General Assembly.  Or maybe we like most Americans have tuned out advertising to the extent we no longer notice the visual blight billboards create.

Even more invisible and more deadly are the health hazards to which billboards contribute by enabling air and water pollution, increased erosion and surface temperatures and release of climate warming gases.

My guess is that soon, public opinion will give a death sentence to outdoor billboards the same way it did to using them to advertise tobacco.

In a Forbes article entitled No Billboards, No Outdoor Advertising?  What Next?, Scott Goodson, the author of a blog and a book entitled Uprising, told of one such uprising that has happened already.

In 2007, the world’s fourth-largest metropolis, São Paulo, Brazil put into effect a “Clean City Law” including an immediate ban on outdoor advertising as a form of “visual pollution,” even taking on media giant Clear Channel.

In a matter of months São Paulo took down 15,000 billboards.  Today, the measure retains an incredible 70% approval rating, coincidentially the same percentage of North Carolinians who see billboards as desecration.

Businesses and residents alike in São Paulo have been suddenly and joyously exposed to the community’s rich sense of place.

Firms there rapidly realized they had never questioned whether billboards actually worked.  As Goodson notes, “they realized that bombarding people with a visual traffic jam was never going to make an impact.  They learnt [sic] that one-way advertising doesn’t work anymore.”

The ban also “catalyzed” Brazilian brands and the ad industry there to “make a giant leap to digital.”

One day soon, North Carolina’s lawmakers too will rediscover the genius of the 1971 amendment to put roadside forests ahead of out-of-state billboard interests. 

It too will be be accompanied by a rediscovery of the state’s unique sense of place and a gestalt on the part of business.

A New Era of Purpose

There are many reasons when visiting Durham, North Carolina, where I live, to take in Duke Homestead, a state historic site four and one-half miles north and east of downtown.

One series of nostalgic displays and dioramas documents how tobacco and all other products were marketed in this country from the mid-1600s to the mid-1960s.  As Bob Garfield and Doug Levy quip in their new book Can’t Buy Me Like, this era “took America from Plymouth Rock to the Vietnam War.”

It is what Dr. Philip Kotler and Hermawan Kartajaya called Marketing 1.0 in their 2010 white paper.  Most people who think they know a lot about marketing (but really don’t have a clue) remain stuck in that pre-1965 mind-set.  They mistake marketing for advertising which has rapidly reached extinction.

Into the 1960s as that era began to peter out, school kids in Raleigh were still being bused to Durham on field trips to take tours of the historic Lucky Strike Factory in Downtown.  Tobacco wasn’t the only addictive product to benefit from that era.  So was soda “pop” as we called it in Idaho where I grew up, as well as snack food.

The mid-1960s saw the emergence of a brief 45-year “consumer era” of marketing because emphasis switched from the product to the consumer.  This consciousness also also helped mark the beginning of the end for tobacco.  The Lucky Strike Factory in Durham closed in the late 1980s.

One of those kids from Raleigh who may have been on one of those field trips, eventually resurrected the old Durham factory in 2004.  By leveraging parts of a family fortune built on “product era” advertising along with historic tax credits and more than a hundred million dollars from local governments in surrounding infrastructure and facilities, he was able to turn it into a showcase for adaptive reuse.

That was the same year that Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook, kick-starting a new era of marketing that Kotler and Kartajaya  call Marketing 3.0, or values-driven marketing and that Garfield and Levy call the “relationship era” based on “marketing with purpose,” a concept coined by Mark McKinney.

In my opinion, the “marketing-with-purpose era” will soon spell the end of other addiction-driven products laden with sugar, salt and fat because their purpose is as flawed as tobacco.  Some say their tactics of denial, obstruction and insensitivity to public health are based on the same playbook.

When I agreed to make Durham, North Carolina my adopted home in 1989 to practice what would be the last half of a 40-year career in community-destination marketing, only between 10% and 14% of residents in this state had become obese.

Eight years later, as tobacco advertising was further being banned on outdoor billboards, that percentage was nudging 19% and today it is over 29%.  Nationwide, one our of every three Americans is obese.

“Birthers” still claim the bans on tobacco are a conspiracy.  A more thoughtful objection to bans on products that fuel obesity such as sodas, argue in op-eds such as this one last month that government should not intervene because “true character growth can only occur when someone chooses freely.”

Others would argue based on ethical dilemmas as this op-ed by a former police officer does in questioning the use of traffic cameras to inhibit those who deliberately run red lights.

Good points but I am much more persuaded by an op-ed a few weeks ago by Dr. Robert Frank, an economist at Cornell.  In his 1859 essay On Liberty, John Stuart Mill argued that - "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others."

It was calculated that in 2008, the medical costs associated with obesity were $147 billion a year alone.  These costs are born by each and every individual using the health system in America.  Someone’s right to chug as much soda as they can drink ends with the harm their actions bring to others.

My rights should not be dependent on how long it may take someone to develop character enough to cut back on soda and Cheetos or on how much they let their children imbibe.

In her new book Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal, Mary Roach notes that “our earliest forbears evolved a taste for important but scarce nutrients: salt and high-energy fats and sugars.”

No longer scarce, businesses today are making billions of dollars marketing products made only of these nutrients and appealing to our primal instincts surrounding these tastes, and it shows in rates of obesity.

I suspect these companies are fully aware of the addictive properties of sugar as documented in Michael Moss’s new book.  Brain chemistry research has proven though that addiction is not due to a lack of character or willpower.

As chronicled in the new book Clean by David Sheff, addiction to substances is a far more serious threat to society than was dismissed in that recent op-ed as an opportunity to develop character and the companies pushing it are or should be fully aware by now.

These companies aren’t the only ones out of step.  Many see evidence that gun manufacturers are even more overt in using the stalling tactics that tobacco used for decades as does the outdoor billboard industry, an all-but-obsolete enabler of desecration marketing.

The authors of Can’t Buy Me Like quote Andy Kessler as calling the 2010 invention of the “Like” button by Facebook as “one of the most valuable innovations in technology over the last several decades.”

It is great marketing for Facebook, but as noted in USA Today this week, many businesses - particularly small businesses - need to take heed from Garfield and Levy who note that “…a brand needs a social voice but a brand is not defined by its social voice.”

In this new era of purpose-marketing, it is crucial that a business or organization or community understand its core purpose and be able to communicate its values and add value for its audiences.

In later posts, I’ll revisit “Marketing with Purpose.”  In the meantime I hope these resources will be of value to you.

Thanks to the powerful sugar and guns lobbies, it just may be that the consumers of products that foster addictions to primal substances such as sugar and fat will curb the conduct of companies more quickly than government will.

Obesity Is a Red and Blue Issue

The uproar by conservative callers to a recent talk radio conversation on WPTF broadcasting from nearby Raleigh was deafening. The callers were raging against the experimental use of fresh salad bars in some public schools to promote better nutrition. It was followed by the even more recent snarking by former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, taking a cheap shot on her TV show at Michelle Obama’s concern about the dramatic increase in childhood obesity.

I’m sure beneath the hubris and idiocy of some of these comments is a legitimate concern about how effective policy can be without “personal responsibility” on the part of both parents and students; but many callers just sounded resentful of an effort to give today’s school children the very same head start we were given. This is the same miserly thinking that has undermined physical education, bands, recess and other potentially healthful benefits in public schools.

As you can see in one of the illustrations shown in this blog, obesity is very prevalent in a lot of red states so this isn’t an ideological issue.

Those “holier-than-thou” conservative talk show callers may have been even more angry had they known that the forerunner of today’s school lunch program started in the 1930’s during the Great Depression when famed-Iowan Harry Hopkins encouraged state relief administrators to provide them, both for nutrition and to encourage urban gardening.

Maybe they would have shut up even more had they known that school lunch programs became nationwide during World War II as a national security issue. Too many military recruits suffered from malnutrition.

Flash forward and that what concerns our First Lady is also a deep concern among today’s military leaders. Only this time obesity and lack of fitness are threatening national security. There was even a news story this week that the military is dumbing down basic training to cope with issues like obesity among recruits.

Obesity is much more than just being overweight and it doesn’t come from being well fed, it comes from eating too much of the wrong types of foods - often the only foods too readily available to those on low incomes., Primarily it is the result of simply overeating and not getting enough exercise.

Regardless of the personal issues involved, it is an epidemic and it is undermining national security and the obvious place to re-instill good eating habits in a near universal sense is in the public schools. We can intensify lessons about “personal responsibility” at the same time.

Preaching “shoulds” to parents who already missed out on or ignored those lessons isn’t going to create the kind of rapid and broad-based change we need to be more nationally secure and to stave off the incredible public health costs inherent in obesity.

An example of how we’re paying for it is illustrated in this link to an interactive map on Slate showing how rapidly diabetes, one of the results of obesity, has advanced in just four short years from 2004 to 2008.

Gripe about possibly paying increased taxes to provide salads for lunches all you want, but be assured that you will pay now or you will pay later for the costs to society that are the eventual outcome or poor nutrition and eating habits.

For those who want at the same time to do more than rant about “personal responsibility” I leave you with a link to a new app to set goals (much more than a to-do list this time) and some very useful words of wisdom on how to set resolutions by authors Chip and Dan Heath.

Happy New Year and may you celebrate in moderation!