By Teresa Green, Linda Golodner Food Safety & Nutrition Fellow

Halloween and all of the sweet treats American families buy at this time of year are a reminder of one of many critical issues Congress must address: U.S. sugar program reform. Costing American consumers an extra $3.5 billion a year in higher grocery bills, the sugar program, which began during the Great Depression, is in dire need of reform.

The National Consumers League (NCL ) has a history of opposing agricultural subsidies. We have opposed both the sugar program, which benefits a small number of growers, and dairy subsidies. The main reason we oppose these programs is that they result in higher prices for consumers. The U.S. sugar program costs the average family of four $40 per year. This may seem like an insignificant amount, but when multiplied by 300 million Americans, the total cost to U.S. consumers is $3.5 billion every year.

By artificially raising the U.S. price of sugar, the program acts as a hidden tax on consumers, impacting all products that use sugar. These items include the obvious things like candy, cookies and other treats, but also less obvious products such as bread, tomato sauce, peanut butter and frozen veggies.  Furthermore, this “hidden tax” is also regressive, because low-income consumers spend a higher percentage of their income on food.

NCL is a proud member of the Coalition for Sugar Reform. The Coalition is made up of a diverse group of companies and organizations, which are united in opposing the costly U.S. sugar program and are urging policymakers to reform it.

The Coalition for Sugar Reform has been working hard to reform the program through the farm bill, an important piece of legislation that is generally updated every five years.  This year, the bill was not rewritten due to partisan squabbling on the Hill.  There are indications that it will be addressed either in the “lame-duck” session or early on in the new Congress.  Either way, NCL hopes that Congress will take a hard look at the sugar program and enact much-needed reform.

By Teresa Green, Linda Golodner Food Safety & Nutrition Fellow

Today marks the celebration of the second annual Food Day, a day hosted by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI). This year, food day will be celebrated by people across the nation who have organized almost 3,000 events. These events will range from cooking classes to food flash mobs to talks on important food topics. Food Day has five main focuses.

1. Promote safer, healthier diets: Increasingly, our nation struggles with the epidemic of obesity. Two-thirds of adults and one-third of children are considered overweight or obese, and these numbers are only predicted to rise. Every year we spend approximately $147 billion on healthcare for diet-related diseases. Only by promoting healthy diets and educating both children and adults about what healthy eating looks like.
2. Support sustainable and organic farms: Throughout the latter half of the 20^th century, agriculture has become increasingly mechanized and large-scale. The use of pesticides has also increased. These changes have in turn inspired the move towards organic agriculture and sustainability which emphasize practices which utilize fewer pesticides and will cause less damage to the earth. These sustainability measures are particularly important given predicted increases in population over the next couple of decades.
3. Reduce Hunger: Near constant discussion of the obesity epidemic can obscure the issue that hunger still plays in this country. An estimated 50 million Americans are “food insecure,” meaning they are close to hunger. Additionally, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, formerly known as food stamps) provides, on average, only $4.30 per person per day.
4. Reform factory farms to protect the environment and animals: Confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs), large scale farms that house tens of thousands of animals at a time, have an enormous impact on the environment. These establishments produce massive amounts of waste, which is often spread on neighboring fields and can seep into the environment. Additionally, CAFOs often prophylactically treat animals with antibiotics to prevent diseases that result from crowded conditions. The overuse of antibiotics can lead to the development of antibiotic resistant bacteria which in turn can be transmitted to humans, causing devastating illnesses.
5. Support fair working conditions for food and farm workers: While farm work is grueling and difficult, the pay is minimal and individuals who labor in the fields have salaries that vary from $17,000 to $24,000, depending upon the state. These workers are also not protected by the Fair Labor Standards Act, which means they are not guaranteed basic protections other workers are afforded, including child labor protections. It is not uncommon for children as young as 12 to work 10- and 12-hour days, performing back-breaking work, harvesting fruits and vegetables in 100-degree heat.

Food Day should be an important day for all Americans because all of us need food to survive. Food cuts across cultural and economic boundaries, uniting us. The creation of a food system that is more fair and sustainable is something that we should all aspire to.

By Brandi Williams, LifeSmarts Program Manager

Reaching out to teens to get them excited about consumer education and personal financial literacy was our goal when the LifeSmarts team began developing LifeSmarts Training Camp in 2011. Training Camp was designed as an educational field trip to help students explore real-world applications of consumer knowledge, through games, activities, and a live LifeSmarts competition.

In January, the National Consumers League hosted the first Training Camp in the District of Columbia, and it was received with such success that we immediately began planning for a second DC-area camp to kick off the 2012-2013 program year.

This last Tuesday, NCL held a second District of Columbia LifeSmarts Training Camp! Hosted by our friends at Google Washington, DC, 12 teams of students and teachers from across the area joined us for full day of fun! Students and teachers spent the day working together in teams of five students and one coach on topic-focused activities and gained points and prizes throughout the day. Teams waited eagerly for the awards ceremony to discover which teams would be recognized for having the highest team scores.

The first-place prize went to McKinley Technical High School, coached by Melanie Wiscount. The team received movie passes, LifeSmarts t-shirts and flashdrives, and a pizza party, and the coach received a $100 gift card.

Prizes were also awarded to the second-place team, also from McKinley Technical High School, coached by Sarah Elwell, and the third place team, from Eastern High School, coached by Ricardo Neal.

Judges helped us determine our Spirit Award winner — the team that best showcased team spirit and good sportsmanship — which was awarded to the team from Archbishop Carroll High School, coached by Sonya Wilson.

Additionally, educators were entered into a random drawing for two $100 gift cards, which were ultimately awarded to coach Egheosa Ibginoba from Coolidge Senior High School and Chantell Moses from Theodore Roosevelt Senior High School.

There was so much energy and excitement throughout the room for the entire day! You can find photos of excited and engaged students by visiting and becoming a fan on Facebook. Students and teachers walked away from Training Camp excited about the knowledge they’d gained and ready to dive into the content of the LifeSmarts program.

Upcoming Training Camps are scheduled for November 9, 2012 in Denver, CO and January 5, 2013 in Atlanta, GA.  If you’re interested in joining, either with a team or as our guest, don’t hesitate to contact us. We’d love to see you there!

Last week, the New York Times featured a front-page story about the new school lunch program, which replaces fried food, French fries, burgers, pizza, and chicken fingers with increased fruits and vegetables. The article focused on how the program was causing kids to toss food in the trash bin. Indeed, a federal law, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 set a standard for healthier foods in school lunches. The Times article was incendiary in my opinion. The photograph splashed on the front page showed several plates of lovely green lettuce discarded in the trash bin at the end of the cafeteria line.

The article raised several serious concerns that call out for a response. One billion kids throughout the world are deprived of food, shelter, and clean water; 200 million are chronically undernourished. They would be grateful for a nutritious, balanced school lunch that provided them 850 calories, an amount many don’t see in an entire day. Honestly, where will it end? Kids are making videos showing themselves collapsing from hunger. In the hit song “We Are Young” by Fun, one student on the video sings, “My friends are at the corner store, getting junk so they don’t waste away.”

Secondly, fresh fruits and vegetables are a luxury that should be coveted, not trashed. The Times article makes much out of the fact that school lunches have become more expensive as a result of these changes – how much more expensive? They now cost a whopping $2.60 cents. 850 healthy calories for $2.60 cents; Sounds like an incredible bargain to me. And there are subsidies for those kids who can’t afford the $2.60. Additionally, the government recently approved an increase in the amount it reimburses schools for meals, provided those schools implement the new guidelines.

Third, childhood obesity is an epidemic in America. The percentage of overweight children in the United States is growing at an alarming rate, with 1 out of 3 kids now considered overweight or obese. Too many kids are used to eating calorie-laden, fast food options—including pizza and chicken nuggets in school lunch—that are high in fat, sugar and sodium. We should be celebrating, not attacking, the Healthy Hunger Free Kids Act because it offers an alternative to these kids. While the school lunch program was established to deal with the endemic problem of childhood hunger—a problem which has by no means been solved—the bigger issue today is the rising tide of obesity. Scientists now estimate that children of this generation will be the first in history to have a lower life expectancy that their parents. Obesity plays a major role in this frightening development.

Fourth, what this article really illustrates is the importance of teaching children good nutrition early in life. The Web site KidsHealth suggests teaching kids early to eat and enjoy fruits and vegetables. The site notes that “Kids, especially younger ones, will eat mostly what’s available at home. That’s why it’s important to control the supply lines — the foods that you serve for meals and have on hand for snacks.” Exactly. KidsHealth recommends working fruits and vegetables into the daily diet. If you don’t teach kids to enjoy these healthy options at an early age, lettuce on the lunch tray won’t look appealing. But unless parents teach kids that salads and fruits and vegetables are not only healthy but can also taste really good, kids won’t develop a taste for these foods. As a result, they land in the garbage bin.

At the end of this blog is a list of suggestions to help parents foster good eating habits for their children. They are common sense suggestions that, if followed by American families, would not result in teenagers tossing perfectly good lunch offerings into the trash because they’ve been raised to think French fries, pizza and chicken nuggets are the only desirable lunch options. I think the New York Times did a disservice to the cause of improving the health and nutrition of our nation’s teens by sensationalizing this issue.

Follow these basic guidelines:

• Work fruits and vegetables into the daily routine, aiming for the goal of at least five servings a day. Be sure you serve fruit or vegetables at every meal.
• Make it easy for kids to choose healthy snacks by keeping fruits and vegetables on hand and ready to eat. Other good snacks include low-fat yogurt, peanut butter and celery, or whole-grain crackers and cheese.
• Serve lean meats and other good sources of protein, such as fish, eggs, beans, and nuts.
• Choose whole-grain breads and cereals so kids get more fiber.
• Limit fat intake by avoiding fried foods and choosing healthier cooking methods, such as broiling, grilling, roasting, and steaming. Choose low-fat or non-fat dairy products.
• Limit fast food and low-nutrient snacks, such as chips and candy. But don’t completely ban favorite snacks from your home. Instead, make them “once-in-a-while” foods, so kids don’t feel deprived.
• Limit sugary drinks, such as soda and fruit-flavored drinks. Serve water and low-fat milk instead.

Every year 4,000 patients end up with “retained surgical items” left in their bodies after surgery, the vast majority are sponges used to soak up blood. These “retained” items can cause lifelong distress and discomfort. New technology and sponge counting methods are available to make it easier to address the problem, but hospitals are resisting. Dr. Verna Gibbs, a professor of surgery at the University of Calfornia, San Francisco, is director of “NoThing Left Behind” a national surgical patient safety project. The New York Times recently reported that all sorts of tools are left in patients by mistake – not only sponges, which account for 2/3 of the left items, but clamps, scalpels, and even scissors!

The new technologies include radio-frequency tags, which tracks use of sponges with a tiny radio frequency tag. When the operation is complete, a detector alerts the surgery team if any sponges are inside the patient and is very effective in spotting things left behind. Another tracking system relies on bar codes for every sponge, but apparently, according to the Times, fewer than 1 percent of hospitals employ it. One doctor quoted in the article was sued before he became an advocate of electronic tracking, and now he won’t do surgery without the technology at work to make sure he and his team don’t leave any “retained’ items inside patients. Why don’t more hospitals use this technology? “In my heart, I think it comes down to hospitals not wanting to spend the extra 10 bucks,” he told the Times. That’s troubling, especially when $10 per operation cost for the added technology could save millions in malpractice costs.

Professor Gibbs says technology should be used in combination with other methods for accountability among surgery teams. Sure, the whole team must be involved in making sure items are not left inside patients, but technology can help a lot. Hospitals should be adopting it across the board because it’s the most foolproof way – in a system full of potential human errors – to protect patients. It’s that simple.