The David Gillespie Blog

What do these foods have in common:

Give up? They all have the same GI. GI stands for glycaemic index and, simply put, it is a measure of the degree to which any given food produces a spike in blood sugar (and therefore insulin).

It’s kind of like the different types of fuel you can feed a fire. If you put pine planks on the fire, they will burn very hot and very quickly but they will be used up in minutes. If, however, you put hardwood sleepers in, they will burn slowly for hours. Low-GI foods are hardwood sleepers to our body and high-GI foods are pine planks.

Lately people have been putting it about that we should all eat low GI foods. The theory is that if you aim to keep blood-glucose levels and therefore insulin levels low and constant, your appetite will be largely suppressed and large quantities of insulin will not be being released and used to create body fat.

GI diets effectively treat all of us like we are suffering from insulin dependent diabetes. If you need an injection of insulin to lower your blood sugar then it is pretty important to avoid foods which will cause sudden spikes in blood sugar. But if you don’t then there is precious little evidence that GI makes any difference whatsoever to your health.

All of the foods in the list not only have the same GI, it is a low-GI (46). So if you were on a Low-GI diet you could merrily chomp on any of those foods with a completely clear conscience. Does a diet of M&Ms, Nutella and pasta make sense to you? Do you think you’d lose weight or be healthier? No, neither do I.

The latest innovation on the GI marketing bandwagon is low-GI sugar. It’s apparently produced by increasing the particle size of the molasses used to create brown sugar and retaining more of the phenols and other vitamins and minerals in the original sugar cane. This produces a lower GI than normal white sugar (50 as opposed to 65). Great but it’s still sugar and it’s still half fructose, one of the most dangerous sugars known to man. In fact if you really wanted a low GI sugar you should go for pure fructose. Its GI is only 19.  And don’t need to guess too hard to know what I think of that.

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with GI as a piece of information about food. It’s just not very helpful if you are trying to eat well, because it is so easily manipulated as a marketing device.

Lowering the GI of sugar is a cynical marketing exercise that’s right up there with lowering the carbon emissions of the cows that make the glass and a half of milk in every bar of Cadbury’s chocolate. What’s next low carbon land mines, odourless cigarettes or perhaps even organic rat poison?

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Cadbury is worried about the carbon footprint of its chocolate.  I think there are plenty of things to worry about with chocolate but I must admit that the carbon footprint would have been close to the bottom of the list.

Apparently the ‘glass and a half of full cream milk’ is responsible for 60 percent of the total greenhouse gas emissions produced by the construction of a family block of Dairy Milk Chocolate.  But don’t worry, Cadbury plan to feed the cows more clover so they burp less and give them less fibre so they … (well, you get the picture).  All of this feed manipulation will result in a carbon emission reduction of 50 percent by 2020.  I do hope Kevin is paying attention.

Cadbury have also decided that they should look out for the lactose intolerant among us with a very clear warning.  From now on Dairy Milk Chocolate will come with a warning label: “CONTAINS MILK”.  I’m so glad they bothered.

But that’s not the end of the image management.  Cocoa has a bit of a bad rap because lately people have noticed that most of it gets picked by children paid little or nothing for their efforts.  So Cadbury plan get themselves a Fairtrade logo by the end of August 2009, but only for chocolate on sale in the UK.  Australian consumers clearly aren’t fussy about such things.  So the cocoa used in Australian Cadbury products will continue to exploit third world children.

You may be wondering about the motivation for this flurry of positive spin (at least in the UK).  Cadbury have created a billion dollar empire off the back of a product that is 55.5 percent sugar and 29.5 percent fat. 

More than half of their product is as addictive as cocaine and has been unequivocally proven to cause obesity, type II diabetes and heart disease.  I’m struggling to think of a food that could be more dangerous for human consumption.  And so far they’ve gotten away with convincing us all it’s a harmless treat. 

Are we really expected to believe they’ve gone all tree-huggy and grown a conscience?  No, the far more likely explanation is that all this work is aimed at making us feel a bit better about chocolate.  The hope being that, when folks like Dr Walker call for a chocolate tax, right thinking people will quietly point him and his ilk to Cadbury’s impeccable green credentials and responsible labelling. 

Dr Walker is a British GP who wants governments to become our nanny and stop us eating chocolate.  It’s a silly proposal and it got voted down by the British Medical Association (by only two votes), but it’s indicative of a distinctly anti-chocolate mood that is gathering pace in old blighty.

We don’t need warnings about milk on our milk chocolate, but we do need warnings like these:

CONTAINS FRUCTOSE: WILL MAKE YOU OBESE AND GIVE YOU TYPE II DIABETES.

CONTAINS FAT: WILL HELP THE FRUCTOSE MAKE YOU OBESE.

CONTAINS COCOA: PICKED BY CHILDREN FOR LITTLE OR NO PAY.

Let’s stop worrying about flatulent cows and start worrying about exploited children in Africa and fat children here. 

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Pre-emptive strikes are all the fashion these days. Got a pesky middle-eastern dictator hiding weapons of mass destruction? A first strike should sort him out. Got a bit of a global financial crisis on the horizon? Head it off by giving everyone a new plasma TV.

But first strikes don’t always work out so well (just ask George Bush). Early last year a medical pre-emptive strike was abandoned because it was killing too many people.  The US National Institutes of Health stopped part of an ongoing clinical trial on diabetes because it was clear that the patients receiving the treatment had a 22 percent higher risk of death than the people who weren’t.

The study involved aggressively treating high blood sugar with medication. Type II diabetes is caused by persistently high blood sugar. The standard treatment for high blood sugar (and therefore diabetes) is a prescription of ‘eat less fat and exercise more’. When that doesn’t work (as it almost never does) the prescription is changed to a combination of drugs.

There are a few different types of medication but the ones most commonly used in Australia work by stimulating the body to produce more insulin. Insulin is the hormone we naturally produce to clear sugar from the blood. But when there is too much fat in the arteries, the body becomes less sensitive to insulin and the sugar doesn’t get cleared. If blood sugar stays high for a long time, damage starts to occur in places where we have lots of small blood vessels, such as our kidneys, our eyes and eventually our hands and feet.

The drugs squeeze that little bit more insulin out of our pancreas to help clear the blood sugar. As you might expect, putting the pancreas on overdrive eventually results in it conking out completely. Then the only option is to start injecting insulin every day. By then, the drugs have converted a Type II diabetic (who produces insufficient insulin) into a Type I Diabetic (who produces none).

Unfortunately a side effect of the drugs is weight gain. Giving people more insulin (or having them produce it themselves) simply channels sugar out of the bloodstream and converts it into body fat.

The preferred long term measure of blood sugar is the haemoglobin A1c test. People without diabetes will have an A1c between four and six percent. The current treatment goal for people with diabetes is to manage the use of drugs so as to keep A1c less than seven percent.  The abandoned trial was an attempt to see if it would be possible to use even higher doses of drugs and push people back into the normal range. And it appears not to have been a very good idea at all. The side effect became a bit nastier than simply putting on a few kilos. Twenty two percent more of the patients died.

Giving more insulin to an insulin resistant person is like curing arterial blockage by increasing blood pressure. A smarter strategy is to remove the blockage. Unfortunately for diabetics the ‘blockage’ is high blood fats, something which can’t just be sliced out with the surgeon’s scalpel.

Diabetes now afflicts 13 percent of the US adult population with double that number estimated to be pre-diabetic (insulin resistant), a total of 40 percent. Australia is not there yet but we are tramping that path as fast as our fat little feet can carry us. When 40 percent of our adult population requires treatment with a lifelong course of drugs, we’d better start thinking about some serious tax increases to keep the health system afloat. Paying back the economic stimulus package will be the least of our worries.

The standard pharmacological treatment for diabetes doesn’t cure anything. It merely offers an invidious trade-off between avoidance of kidney damage, blindness and gangrene today and weight gain and permanent pancreatic damage tomorrow.

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Australia’s tank commanders are having trouble telling which large objects on the parade ground are tanks and which are the men who are supposed to be driving them. Things in the navy are a little easier. The ships are the grey things.

Recent reports have revealed that one in seven military folk are medically obese. A number like that would be trumpeted from the highest government office if it applied to the rest of us. The non-military portion of society sailed past those figures sometime in the eighties. But it’s troubling to those who were counting on the military to be of some use should we be attacked.

The average Australian digger is now 16 kilograms heavier than the men who stormed Gallipoli. But those men came from very different time and ate a very different diet. In 1915 Cadbury had only just started shipping its Dairy Maid Chocolate bar, the first ever packaged chocolate product. In the United States, Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola were still garage operations run out of sheds behind the pharmacies of their inventors. The men stepping ashore at Anzac Cove had never even tasted packaged chocolate or fizzy drink unless they had a generous relative in the mother country.

Corn flakes were the stuff of science fiction. Men shipping out for Gallipoli wouldn’t be able to buy breakfast cereal for another decade. And the only place they’d taste fruit juice they hadn’t squeezed themselves was in Church on Communion Sunday. It would be 40 years before they could buy orange juice at all in Australia.

There weren’t many overweight people. Four out of every five people from that time were downright skinny by today’s standards. Obesity was as rare then as underweight politicians are today. There was no such thing as heart disease and the medical speciality of cardiology wasn’t even going to be necessary for another quarter of a century.

Obviously no-one was getting rich selling diets or gym-memberships. There wasn’t even enough interest in diets to start a woman’s magazine. The first copy of Woman’s Weekly wouldn’t be rolling off the presses for another quarter of a century and it would be more than half a century before the first Weight Watcher’s meeting would happen.

The men who went off to fight at Gallipoli had grown up in households where sugar was a very occasional treat. It was too expensive to use every day and almost none of their food had any added before they bought it.

That’s a stark contrast to today where the modern soldier is fed sugar in almost every mouthful. They are eating almost 1.4 kilograms of sugar a week. Sugar is embedded in everything from their breakfast cereal to their drinks and everything in between.

The tidal wave of sugar is causing the epidemic of obesity and its nasty consequences from heart disease to diabetes. Unfortunately what we are seeing is just the start of what will turn out to be a significant problem for the defence forces (and everyone else) in the coming decade.

The military is tough on who it is prepared to take. Before 2006 you couldn’t have a Body Mass Index (BMI) of more than 30 (the border between being merely overweight and being obese). In 2006, as part of the Government’s drive to increase recruitment, the goal post was moved to 33. At the current rate of expansion of our collective waistline, soon the only person fit to serve will the winner of The Biggest Loser.  Not surprisingly, the military is conducting a study to see if the goal post can be moved again.

The elephant in the room (or perhaps in this case, on the parade ground) is getting hard to hide. For decades there has been grumbling by researchers that couldn’t prove that feeding rats fat made them fat but could prove that feeding them sugar not only made them fat but gave them heart disease, type II diabetes, fatty liver disease and testicular atrophy.

There is now no scientific doubt that dietary sugar is directly responsible for raising the amount of circulating fat in our body. And the evidence is becoming overwhelming that it is the fructose half of sugar which measurably and directly produces obesity.  But simply telling an obese soldier (or anyone else) to stop eating sugar is pointless in a society where it is almost impossible to find a food that does not have sugar added.

The well meaning digger may no longer put a teaspoon of sugar in their cuppa, but what about the fourteen teaspoons in their ‘healthy’ breakfast cereal and small glass of ‘unsweetened’ apple juice? Or the teaspoon of sugar in every dollop of sauce or mayonnaise?

Obesity can be eliminated as a chronic health problem by the simple removal of fructose from the Australian diet. If that were the rule tomorrow, the industrial food complex would have fructose free foods (which tasted identical) on our supermarket shelves by next Tuesday. But until that is the rule, we will all pay the price with increasingly impaired lifestyles and ultimately shortened lives.

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Also published in Crikey

Apparently I’m not getting my Recommended Daily Intake (RDI) of sugar.  According to the box of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes I encountered in the supermarket this morning, I am supposed to be eating 90g of the stuff every day (or almost 33kg a year). 

Hang on!  I should be eating almost 22 teaspoons of sugar every day?!  Where do they get that from?  I had to find out more.

You won’t find it on their packs, but the answer is buried on the Kellogg’s site under the FAQ for Health Professionals.  They say:

Sugar – 90g – Based on 18% of total energy. This is in line with the Dietary Guidelines for Australian Adults [2003] which recommend to consume only moderate amounts of sugars and foods containing added sugars, and is consistent with the target stated by the Nutrition Taskforce of the Better Health Commission [1987]

I added the links into that quote to make it a bit easier for you to check than Kellogg’s did.  The first report does not set a target of 90g per day or indeed any target at all. It just says you should moderate your intake of sugars. 

The second report is so old that it isn’t available on the internet so I can’t tell you what it says.  But given the first report was written 16 years later and doesn’t mention any guidelines from that older report, I don’t hold out much hope for finding the 90g figure in it either.  And even if it did contain such a recommendation, I wouldn’t put much trust in it given the mountain of human metabolism research that’s been done since then.

Perhaps Kellogg’s pulled the 90g from The Daily Intake Guide produced by its industry lobby group, the Australian Food and Grocery Council.  That guide also uses the 90g figure.  It says that the value is ‘derived from the Nutrient Reference Values for Australia and New Zealand’ [2006]. 

That document prepared by Department of Health and Ageing and does not set any RDI for sugar at all.  It simply notes that the World Health Organisation recommended a level of not more than 10% of energy from sugar in its 2003 Report on Diet and Chronic Diseases.

So in short, I’m at a loss as to where Kellogg’s (and everyone else who signed on to the AFGCs nutrition labelling system) got the figure of 90g of sugar from.  But I do know that putting that on a packet of cereal makes it seem ok that a standard serve (by that I mean what your kids actually eat not what the pack calls a standard serve) contains up to five teaspoons of sugar.  After all, that’s less than a quarter of your RDI.

Calling it an RDI gives legitimacy to the figure as if it’s an essential nutrient without which we would expire.  No-one needs to eat 3kg of sugar a year, let alone 33kg! 

It’s time for food manufacturers to stop playing ducks and drakes with food labelling.  The RDI for sugar should be 0g per day and the amount the food exceeds that should be clearly labelled.

Anyone who’s read Sweet Poison would agree that you’d have to be pretty stupid to eat sugar. But research published this month in Diabetes Care establishes a direct link between consuming fructose and ‘impaired cognitive function’. Put more directly, sugar makes you stupid.

2,977 people suffering from Type II Diabetes, aged 55 years and older took part in the study.   They were subjected to a 30-minute battery of tests designed to measure things such as how fast they performed calculations and how well they multi-tasked.  Some of the tests also measured the accuracy of their memory.  

Paul Lucas, Queensland’s Deputy Premier has a weight problem. His jeans don’t fit but that’s not really the issue. Portly Paul’s boss, the botox pumpin’, half marathon runnin’, Premier is his real problem.

Captain Bligh wants her crew to shape up or ship out before the next election. There’ll be push-ups on the poop deck and calisthenics on the quarter-deck if Bligh gets her way. Concerned that her front bench will soon all be visible on satellite pictures, the Premier wants Queensland’s leaders to show the rest of us how a little bit of exercise can turn them back into able-seamen first-class.

The new ministerial lard reduction policy is very much in line with Queensland’s current ‘Find your 30’ fitness campaign. It exhorts everyone to find 30 minutes of activity every day so they can stop being so obese (perhaps not an exact quote). And is a response to reports like the one released by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare in October.  That report revealed that in the last decade alone the number of overweight and obese Australians jumped from 41.1 percent in 1998 to 59.3 percent now.

The usual response to this kind of report is that we haven’t been doing enough exercise. But according to the Australian Sports Commission, in 2006, two thirds of us exercised at least once a week and almost 43 percent of us participated in sport three or more times a week. These numbers should be treated with caution as they are based on self-completed survey forms. We all tend to exercise more when filling out survey forms.

As with most things, money may be a more reliable indicator. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, between 1998 and 2004, we spent almost 20 percent more on physical activity including a whopping 92 percent increase in the number of gym memberships we purchased. 

Even in the US, where all kinds of unwelcome records are being set for obesity, the figures don’t match the spin. According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, the number of students participating in high school athletics has just increased for the 19th consecutive year. And it’s not just the kids. Like us, their parents have been spending up big on sports gear. Sporting apparel sales are up 35.3 percent since 2000 and sports shoe sales are up 44.2 percent. Sports equipment sales more than doubled between 1990 and 2008 (from $30b to almost $70b).

Perhaps we are just enrolling in gyms and filling our cupboards with gym equipment and gear to make us look like we exercise – it happens. A better test would be a fitness activity that we pay for only when it is really used. Personal training is a very high growth industry in the US and Australia. In 1999 there were 127,310 personal trainers in the US. That figure had almost doubled to 219,990 in 2007. Australian data shows a similar trend. In the 2006 census, 13,800 people said there were employed as fitness instructors up from 7,669 in the 1996 census.

The numbers don’t lie. Most of us are exercising much more than we used to, but we’re still getting fatter at an alarming rate. If only being thin were simply a matter of running around the corridors of power for an extra half an hour a day.

The problem with exercise is that it just doesn’t burn that many calories. And any calories that it does use are very easily replaced with very small changes in diet. A quick bit of maths on a calorie counter tells us that the average overweight pollie will burn up to 100 more Calories in their daily 30 minutes of moderate exercise than they would have if they had been sitting in Parliament. The small packet of Chico Babies that Premier Bligh likes to keep in her ministerial car contains almost five day’s worth of Calories at that burn rate. So why not skip the Chicos and the two and half hours of jogging and call it a day?

Even in the 1940s, doctors supported the self evident proposition that if you exercise more you will eat more. Most of the medical profession quite logically suggested that bed rest was more likely than exercise to help with obesity. One leading medical textbook at the time even famously quoted a study which showed that lumberjacks ate twice as much as tailors and concluded that ‘Vigorous muscle exercise usually results in immediate demand for a large meal’. It shouldn’t then come as much of surprise that study after study since then has failed to establish any direct link at all between weight loss and exercise.

This message was hijacked in 1960’s by influential French-American Nutritionist, Jean Mayer. Aided and abetted by the newly created sports shoe and sports clothing industries, the ‘exercise makes you thin’ message gained momentum to the point where today we are faced with incessant state sponsored cajoling towards exercise as a solution to our obesity problem.

Logic says exercising to lose weight shouldn’t work and science backs that up, but neither is relevant to a politician wanting to look like they are doing something. But before Captain Bligh sends us all for a long walk on a short plank for failing a fat fold test, let’s take a look at what the research really says. Exercise won’t stop you getting fatter but being choosy about what you put in your mouth very definitely will.

Published in The Australian

At this time of year thoughts inevitably turn to resolutions.  First on the list for most of us is a determination to be a mere shadow of our former selves next Christmas.

The experts tell us the way to achieve that is with diet and exercise.  Times are tough and getting tougher so before we madly sign up to the latest fad diet or enrol at the local gym, it’s worth taking a moment or two to think about how much it all might cost. 

A few years ago, Forbes Magazine (the influential US mag for the leaders of the business world), decided to take a good hard look at the numbers (as business people often do).  They looked at the 10 most popular diets in the US, calculated how much the special foods required would cost and averaged out the membership cost (if there was one).  They then compared this to the average amount spent by a single person on food ($84 per week).

They found that being on a diet cost up to $210 per week (or $126 more than not being on a diet).  If you sign up to a gym you can add an extra $20 a week to that.  If you’re feeling really gung ho you can add a personal trainer for an extra $80 a session.

But in the spirit of all good resolutions, let’s assume we can manage to stick to the plan for 12 months.  Over a year we can expect to spend an additional $6,552 on food and an extra $1,040 on gym membership for a total cost of $7,592 without the personal trainer or $11,752 with the trainer (assuming you train with them for one hour per week).

US Government research suggests that most of us are back to where we started (or worse) within a year.  So the eleven and a half grand would probably be better spent putting down a deposit on a house (ok well that’s not really enough but perhaps some nice shoes?).

Traditional diets don’t work and cost a fortune, but there is a better way.  Sweet Poison describes a lifestyle change which anybody can make without costing them a cent (except for the book of course).  If anything, you will spend less on food as your appetite control is restored to normal.  There’s no gym fees to pay. In fact if you don’t feel like it you need not exercise at all.  There’s no meetings to attend and no program fees to pay.  There’s no special food to buy and there’s no menu plan to stick to.  All you need to do is avoid things which taste sweet.  The End.  That’s it – oops, now I’ve spoiled the ending … 

Astute readers of these pages may have noticed a conspiracy afoot in recent times. The children of Queensland have been scheming to embarrass the Education Department. Without fear or favour the juvenile delinquents have relentlessly failed to be educated. The result is that Queensland has demonstrated a resounding lack of achievement in national educational benchmarks.

Not one to be cornered by mewling infants, Premier Bligh tore a page from Populist Leadership for Dummies and immediately appointed a new ‘Czar of making it look like something is being done’ (at least until the next election). But the new Fixer, Melbourne-based Professor Geoff Masters, may find he has bitten off more than he can chew when discovers the latest innovation in Queensland education.

From the start of this term it is compulsory for all Queensland primary school students to attend to schooling for half an hour less per day. We’ve suffered through some pretty bizarre educational theories in Queensland in the last thirty years or so, but not even the most wacky has proposed that exposing children to less education will make them smarter.

Recent research out of Johns Hopkins University suggests that exactly the opposite is true especially for the most disadvantaged in our classrooms. The more exposure a child gets to formal education the more likely they are to achieve better results in standardised tests. This is true of any child but the impact is more profound in the children of low and middle income earners.

However our fearless leaders are not about to have their policies derailed by mere research based on long term, large cohort studies. As part of its Smart Moves policy, the Queensland Government will require that all primary school children participate in 30 minutes of compulsory ‘moderate intensity’ physical activity from today. This time is to be taken out of class time, thereby reducing actual teaching time by about 10 percent.

Prompted by exploding childhood obesity numbers, the thinking behind the policy is obviously that if our kids can’t be smart at least they’ll be thin. Everyone knows that looking good is more important than acing tests, particularly in the Sunshine State. Clearly we’ll need to throw out our Smart State number plates.

If only being thin were simply a matter of running around the playground for an extra half an hour a day. Unfortunately, the research once again fails to support the policy makers. Presumably one of the sources for the idea is the joint guideline on physical activity published by the American Heart Association and the American College of Sports Medicine in August 2007. After reviewing the available evidence, they recommended that 30 minutes of moderate physical activity five days a week is necessary to “promote and maintain health.”

Noticeably absent from the guideline is any suggestion that exercise would definitely lead to any weight reduction. The best they could come up with was: “It is reasonable to assume that persons with relatively high daily energy expenditures would be less likely to gain weight over time, compared with those who have low energy expenditures. So far, data to support this hypothesis are not particularly compelling…“

The problem with exercise is that it just doesn’t burn that many calories. And any calories that it does chew through are very easily replaced with microscopic changes in diet. As Louis Newburgh of the University of Michigan once famously calculated, a hundred and ten kilo man will burn just three Calories walking up a flight of stairs. “He will have to climb twenty flights of stairs to rid himself of the energy contained in one slice of bread!”, said Newburgh.

A quick bit of maths on a calorie counter tells us that the average child will burn about 75 more Calories in 30 minutes of moderate exercise than they would have if they had been sitting in a classroom. That’s about the same number of Calories as the small fruit juice popper which their parents will inevitably feel they require after bouncing around in the sun for half an hour.

None of this is to suggest that there are not good health reasons for exercise, merely that weight loss shouldn’t be the primary motivating factor. But the reality is that, as Newburgh and a slew of those that followed found, exercise actually makes us hungrier and prone to eating more. This is perhaps why the American Heart Association was less than fulsome in its support of the concept.

It’s time the Premier spent less time pounding the pavement in search of a win in the Bridge to Brisbane and more time hitting the books. Our children do not need less time in the classroom. And they certainly don’t need to be missing school to satisfy a mythology about obesity (and how to cure it) which has no foundation in reality. If we don’t want to be printing ‘Fat and Dumb State’ on our number plates, then it’s time to start looking at what the science really says rather than creating yet another feel-good review to get us past today’s ugly headlines.

Published in The Courier Mail 

Everyone knows children should be wary of strangers offering boiled lollies. We should all be equally wary when an industry that makes billions from selling sweets to our children brings us the good news that our kids aren’t really obese.

A couple of weeks ago Kate Carnell, CEO of the Australian Food and Grocery Council (AFGC) declared that it is “simply not true” that Australia is in the grip of a childhood obesity epidemic. Ms Carnell relied on the Australian National Children’s Nutrition and Physical Activity Survey in support of her argument.

That “study” was a telemarketer “weigh-in” paid for (in part) by the AFGC (Ms Carnell forgot to mention that). The AFGC represents Australia’s “highly processed food industry” and has a mandate to “manage issues relevant to the industry and to promote the industry and the virtues of its products, enabling member companies to grow their businesses”. So Ms Carnell was just doing her job.

It won’t surprise many readers to discover that “weigh-ins” conducted by telemarketers suggest that our children are less fat (and exercise more) than we thought. We’re all a lot thinner when doing surveys with strangers on the phone.

Research on the childhood obesity problem in Australia is pretty thin on the ground. And comparing the available data is difficult because of extreme contrasts in methods (and even the definition of what constitutes an obese child).

One thing all the studies and surveys show is a consistent and alarming trend. Even the AFGC sponsored survey showed an increase in childhood obesity over the last such survey in 1995. This trend is reflected in a slew of more rigorous studies of adult obesity. To suggest that a telemarketer weigh-in (partly funded by a group with a commercial interest in the outcome) disproves that trend is, at best, disingenuous.

Ms Carnell used the survey results as a foundation for her argument against further regulation of advertising of junk food to children. The AFGC opposed voluntary regulation of advertising when it was first proposed as part of the watered down recommendations from the 2002 New South Wales Childhood Obesity Summit. When that didn’t work, the AFGC decided to get in the game rather than stand on the sidelines.

And so, Ms Carnell’s argument is part of a bigger campaign for hearts and minds by the AFGC. It is not a campaign for my heart or mind and probably not yours. I’m not an employee of the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) and I certainly don’t sit on the Parliamentary Inquiry into Obesity.

The AFGC campaign is not about convincing you and me that Coke (or any other product sold by one of its members) is health food (although if we happen to come away believing that, it’s well and good). No, it’s about convincing the ACMA (and Parliament) that the AFGC’s members do not market unhealthy foods to children. The ACMA is proposing to update its Children’s Television Standards. At the start of its consultations in 2007 it had toyed with the idea of (gasp) regulating the advertising of food and beverages to children. But, after receiving some forceful submissions from the AFGC on the point, has decided now was not the time.

So what is the AFGC worried about? When you read the fine print, the report says that the ACMA won’t regulate for now. But the door has been left well and truly ajar. The ACMA says it may change its mind if anyone comes up with a standard way of labelling foods which are high in fat, sugar and salt. This would then allow them to seriously consider rules aimed at limiting the advertising of such foods to children.

This is where those busy bodies over at the Parliament come in. Their inquiry into obesity is turning up quite a few submissions from folks like CHOICE who want to see a traffic light system of labelling introduced to help consumers identify such foods. The AFGC has attacked CHOICE for daring to propose such a thing, even going so far as to suggest that their researchers cooked the books.

The AFGC doesn’t plan to sit back and meekly let unambiguous labelling be implemented, so a few months ago, the next part of the master strategy was unveiled on the media stage. The AFGC announced they had a plan. They would voluntarily sign up to a code of conduct that says they won’t advertise to kids under 12 years of age.

What’s wrong with the AFGC’s voluntary ban? Surely they’re helping out by jumping the gun? Well, in a word, no. This way they get to define the word “children”. In its initial examination of the need for reform, The ACMA had been dropping disturbing hints about bans that defined a child as anyone under 16 (rather than 12).

Even worse than that, with the ACMA doing the drafting there would be no chance to parachute in weasel words like the ones proposed by the AFGC. An example appears in the wording of the voluntary “ban” itself when it says the ban should be applied “unless those products represent healthy dietary choices … presented in the context of a healthy lifestyle”.

If you want to know what that looks like, you need look no further than Coke’s new website, which is choc-full of healthy lifestyle messages for Coke drinkers.

The AFGC’s hope is that by showing what terribly good corporate citizens its members are, they’ll head the Parliamentary Obesity enquiry and the ACMA off at the pass. Parliament won’t insist on traffic light labelling and the highly processed food industry will avoid the cascade effect of the ACMA implementing actual bans rather than voluntary ones written by the AFGC.

It may seem like the AFGC is jumping at shadows, but they have paid attention to what befell Big Tobacco. They know it’s better to stop this particular train before it leaves the station. If they can’t, they fear it won’t be long before the only place you’ll be able to see a Coke ad will be in the sealed section of an adult magazine.

Published in Online Opinion