the Sugar Conspiracy 

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Tuesday, July 01, 2003 It's the cheesiest! Kraft Foods, the world's biggest maker of processed foods, said yesterday it would shrink its ready-made meals and snacks to help combat the obesity epidemic. It is also concerned to stave off the mounting threat of lawsuits from overweight people. Fee-hungry lawyers who have become rich on tobacco lawsuits have begun to salivate over the US food industry. Kraft, controlled by Altria which also owns the cigarette maker Philip Morris, is sensitive to the threat. The company has annual worldwide sales of $30bn. As well as reducing the size of its portions for single-serve products, Kraft will cut the sugar, fat and calorie content in many foods. Nutritional labelling will be improved and vending machines in schools will offer healthier snacks. More. Not that I'm promoting Kraft foods here: they still produce processed foods full of stuff that's not really good for you. And less fat certainly doesn't mean no-fat. But I guess it's a start. Like McDonald's eliminating certain antibiotics from their meat, it's better than nothing. I am interested in the focus on lowering the portion size. That's one of the things I noticed when I returned from Ghana - portion sizes in the US, especially in restaurants, but also in store-bought foods, are huge. We have entirely too much food on our plates. Still, it seems like they're dodging a bullet here - trying to set up preventive measures so they can avoid a deluge of lawsuits for selling harmful products to the public. So it's not like Kraft has had an epiphany as to the effect processed foods can have on a hungry public. But that seems to be a good way to affect change - hit 'em where it hurts and attack the bottom line. posted by chris at 10:43 PM   ------------------

    

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