Here’s a classic case of a left hand pulling while the right hand pushes: Dairy Management, a creation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, is very successfully increasing the consumption of cheese in the U.S. — Americans now eat an average of 33 pounds of cheese a year, nearly triple the the 1970 rate — while the USDA itself is the center of the government’s anti-obesity campaign.
An article in the Sunday New York Times used a campaign for Domino’s Pizza as an example. Domino’s sales were falling and consumers rated their product pretty awful. Enter Dairy Management. A team paid by the government worked with Domino’s to develop a new line of pizzas using 40 percent more cheese. Customers loved it. Sales zoomed.
At the same time Dairy Management was pushing cheese consumption up by millions of pounds a year, other USDA employees were urging the public to consume less saturated fat — which is found in whole milk and, you guessed it, cheese. While sales of low-fat and non-fat milk kept growing under the impact of advice from USDA scientists, the American people kept gaining weight.
Michelle Obama, the president’s wife, joined the obesity battle. At a speech she made to the National Restaurant Association’s annual convention she implored her audience to “offer healthy menu options” and deplored the proliferation of cheeseburgers and macaroni and cheese in the nation’s eateries.
As she was speaking, Dairy Management was working with restaurants to expand their menus with cheese-laden products.
Another example cited by the Times is the Taco Bell steak quesadilla, with cheddar, pepper jack, mozzarella and a creamy sauce. The quesadilla uses eight times more cheese than other items on the Taco Bell menu and contains more than three-quarters of the daily recommended level of saturated fat and sodium.
Some of Dairy Management’s tactics verge on dishonesty. The company, which is funded by a check-off on milk sold as well as USDA budget dollars, spent millions on research to support a national advertising campaign promoting the notion that people could lose weight by consuming more dairy products. That campaign went on for four years, ending in 2007, even though other researchers proved the theory to be false.
It was finally discontinued when more and more independent experts said way too much cheese and other fat-heavy dairy products were being eaten by Americans.
The Federal Trade Commission put an end to the claim that eating more dairy foods was a good way to lose weight when the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine petitioned the FTC to act.
“If you want to look at why people are fat today, it’s pretty hard to identify a contributor more signifcant than this meteoric rise in cheese consumption,” Dr. Neal D. Barnard, president of the physicians’ group, told a Times reporter.
THE USDA’S nutrition committee issued a new standard this summer calling for daily diets to contain no more than 7 percent of saturated fat by calorie count. That amounts to about 15.6 grams in a 2,000 calorie diet. But Americans are consuming nearly twice that much. Part of the reason is that the department is spending far more on promoting the increased consumption of cheese than it is on selling Americans on eating healthy diets.
Dairy Management has 162 employees and had a $135 million budget last year. The USDA Center for Nutrition Policy and Promotion — which runs its anti-obesity effort — has a budget of $6.5 million.
Dairy Management’s chief executive officer, Thomas P. Gallager, received $633,475 in compensation in 2008 — and that doesn’t count first-class travel privileges. Two other Dairy Management executives are paid $300,000 a year.
As Congress and the administration focus on ways to trim the federal budget, they could stop spending $135 million a year to defeat their own anti-obesity program.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
