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This week, Eating Liberally's Kat wants to know what I think about Oprah's free pass to KFC for adding grilled chicken to its fast food menu. The interview is below. The moral: watch out for health auras!
Kat: Oprah's getting grilled over her KFC coupon giveaway for a free meal featuring two pieces of KFC's new, healthier grilled chicken (along with two carb-heavy side dishes and a biscuit.) From a purely nutritional perspective, there's no denying grilled is better than fried. But it's a safe bet that the folks who redeem this coupon will be washing that chicken down with gallons of soda. And the meat still comes from factory farms, which Oprah very publicly deplored when she came out in support of Proposition 2.
You witnessed firsthand the appalling conditions to which factory farmed chickens are subjected when you served as a member of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. The environmental degradation that CAFOs cause is another significant problem, as are the lousy working conditions in the poultry processing plants.
Yet, as a nutritionist, you would presumably applaud any attempt by a high-profile figure such as Oprah to nudge folks in a healthier direction. How do you feel about the KFC/Oprah flap?
Dr. Nestle: Your question raises an important philosophical issue hotly debated in the nutrition community today: Is a better junk food a good choice? Some would say that small nutritional improvements multiplied over an entire population will make an important difference to health. This is the philosophy behind shaving milligrams of sugar off of kids' breakfast cereals or adding a gram of fiber here and there.
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But others, and I count myself among them, worry that such small changes merely create a "health aura"--the illusion that anything eaten in the vicinity of something healthful is automatically healthful too.
Researchers demonstrate the power of the health aura to give people license to make less nutritious choices. Brian Wansink and his colleagues at Cornell have shown that putting a low-fat label on a food product is all you have to do to get people to eat more calories from it than they would otherwise. And researchers have just shown that customers will order more French fries from a menu that lists a salad than they will from one that doesn't.
Those are examples of the health aura in action. If grilled chicken works for KFC as salads did for McDonald's, it will bring in new customers, at least temporarily. But health aura research predicts that having a healthier option at KFC will encourage most customers to order more of everything else.
My conclusion: the grilled chicken option is about marketing, not health. The proof? Oprah talked about it.
Where does that leave fast food restaurants? Isn't there anything they can do to promote the health of their customers? Indeed there is. Here are five simple suggestions: they could (1) make it easier and cheaper for customers to order smaller portions, (2) make healthy kids meals the default, (3) add vegetables (other than potatoes) to all of their meals, (4) provide fruit desserts, and (5) reduce the sugars and salt in everything they make.
What do you think the chances are that any fast food place will do these? Grilled chicken is easier and gets them off the hook, apparently.
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Good for KFC for offering more choices to their customers. KFC has an obligation to shareholders to turn a profit, regardless of how healthy the menu content. Fast food companies such as McDonald and the like are openly advertising their nutrition content because of the "food natzis" and government intervention into what Americans can and can not eat. This concept is ridiculous! Americans are free (for now) to eat what we want when we want regardless of how the chickens are treated before they are killed! As long as the food is good, I for one, could care less about the nutritional content and environment of the cows, chickens and hogs before the slaughter. What's next, Concern for the treatment of broccoli before it is beheaded for bagging?
While I understand that fast food companies are under obligation to shareholders, does that let them completely off the hook, morally? I think this is a big part of the problem: companies can rationalize doing morally questionable things by saying that they're just doing right by their shareholders. Perhaps if the companies were obligated to do what's in the best interest for both shareholders and the public, that would help.
Secondly, I agree that everyone has freedom of choice to eat whatever they want (Lord knows I've eaten my share of fast food), but there are two problems here. First, there's not much "choice" between fast food places since all of them are (usually) equally terrible for you. Second, if people don't have the information they need to make an informed decision, choice is compromised. So in this respect, perhaps it's wiser to educate people about what is healthy and what's not. A good start would be teaching nutrition in schools so that people have all the pertinent information with which to make an informed choice.
Third, the concern about how animals are treated on farms is, in my opinion, a bit silly. However, some farming practices (this goes for any farm, not just ones with livestock) are environmentally harmful, and it's worth looking into how to make farming better for the environment.
Why is concern about what an animal has to go through on a farm "a bit silly"? Is concern about what a person has to go through in a prison cell or a dog in a puppy mill also "a bit silly"? Perhaps this assertion could be elevated to the level of an explanation, a justification.
Karen Davis, PhD, President
United Poultry Concerns
(757) 678-7875
karen@upc-online.org
http://www.upc-online.org
First KFC is not just shaving off a few calories and a couple of milligrams of sodium there. There is a difference of nearly 200 calories and 600 milligrams of sodium between the KFC fried chicken breast and the grilled chicken breast.
What is wrong with getting the grilled chicken, a side of green beans and side of Cole slaw? And throw out the biscuit since it is all empty calories and a surprising amount of sodium. BTW do you know what the most caloric thing on the menu is? The A&W Root Beer. A 20oz serving has 300 calories. And these are not the nice make you feel full calories of fat and protein. This is nearly pure HFC empty calories. Two grilled chicken thighs have few calories, for perspective.
People need to be educated about what are the healthy choices and show some common sense and restraint. As Pogo once said "We have met the enemy, and they are us"
I am of two minds on this issue.
First, I completely agree about the health aura issue and the fact that small switches here and there truly will not make things better, and will indeed make them worse.
However, if by continually applying pressure to the fast food industry, citizen groups are able to make the major fast food outlets make small-medium changes year after year, then in 10 years, you suddenly have food that is actually better than the food you had to begin with. It is sort of the opposite of what happened to fast food from the 70's to the 90's. Not only did the ubiquity of fast food grow in that period, the portions grew incrementally and the quality dropped. We didn't get from 8-12 oz soda servings to 48 oz servings in a single year.
So, if each year we drop a few ounces from a serving, add a non-fried salad, and perhaps reduce the level of processing of an ingedient here or there, it does start adding up.
Other than IN-N-Out, i perhaps eat 1-2 fast food meals a year, so I don't come at this discussion as a fan.
Obviously KFC is marketing its grilled chicken and Oprah willingly (or contractually or whatever) played along. She's a savvy businesswoman so it's unlikely there were no sponsorship dollars behind the free pass. And just because you have a free pass doesn't mean you have to use it.
Yes the "health aura" leads to unexpected decisions. But the tone taken in the leading question -- "carb heavy side dishes and gallons of soda" indicates extreme bias against KFC and their ilk in the first place. And the answer isn't much better concluding with "gets them off the hook".
The food industry has flaws and faults in abundance and doesn't merit applause, but when it does offer a healthier choice it should at least be free from attack. If KFC's customers DECIDE to have more of the unhealthy stuff that's the customer's problem, not the restaurant's. And I have yet to see anyone forced into a KFC, McDonald's, Taco Bell, or Pizza Hut for a meal. Nor do I want restaurants babysitting customers and enforcing fat and calorie counts. The customer should be free to make as many bad and unhealthy decisions as the customer wants.
Robert Martin, Executive Director of the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production, told E Magazine: "The most appalling thing we witnessed was a broiler [chicken] facility that produces chickens for eating. We went in and it was totally dark, just three to four dim lightbulbs. They only vented the facility periodically and the dust and ammonia smells were overwhelming."
Animal Researcher John Webster writes in his book on Animal Welfare, A Cool Eye Towards Eden, that industrial chicken production "must constitute, in both magnitude and severity, the single most severe, systematic example of man's inhumanity to another sentient animal."
I live in a chicken-producing area of Virginia and I can tell you that the chickens Oprah is offering to consumers (after pretending on an earlier show to "care" about animal welfare) go to slaughter sick with respiratory infections (airsacculitis) and they are often rotting with diseases such as necrotic enteritis. And they are peeping baby birds with blue eyes forced to grow so fast and abnormally large, most of them go to slaughter with painful lameness and many are blind or semi-blind from the toxic gases they cannot escape from in the virtual cesspools they are raised in.
These sad birds, slaughtered at 6 weeks old, are not healthy. How could they be? My book Prisoned Chickens, Poisoned Eggs: An Inside Look at the Modern Poultry Industry (Book Publishing Company, 2009) tells the story of the pitiless poultry industry and the desolate lives of chickens. No one with a conscious should eat them.
Karen Davis, PhD, President,
United Poultry Concerns.
http://www.upc-online.org.
Oops, I meant to say in the last sentence: No one with a conscience should eat them. Karen Davis