UK: McDonald’s, KFC, Pepsi, to Create GOVT Policy on Obesity

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In the decaying British Empire, where there’s a government camera on every street corner, Britain’s Department of Health has decided to allow fast food companies like McDonald’s and KFC, as well as PepsiCo, Kellogg’s, and Mars, to craft its official government policy on obesity, alcohol and diet-related disease.

Britain’s Health secretary Andrew Lansley created what he calls five “responsibility deal” networks with businesses, co-chaired by ministers, to write the new policies. The alcohol group will be chaired by the Wine and Spirit Trade Association, diet and health problems will be solved by processed food manufacturers, and fast food companies, and a focus group on calories will be headed by non other than PepsiCo, a corporation who knows a thing or two about calories.

Along with leading U.K. supermarkets, and the gratuitous presence of health and consumer groups, McDonald’s, KFC, PepsiCo, and Kellogg’s will “draft priorities and identify barriers, such as EU legislation, that they would like removed”.

And the Health secretary stresses voluntary not regulatory approaches. “It is possible to make progress on issues such as salt reduction through voluntary agreements,” said Faculty of Public Health President Lindsey Davies. He added that the government wanted to improve public health through voluntary agreements with business and other partners, rather than through regulation.

Jeanette Longfield, head of the food campaign group Sustain, said: “This is the equivalent of putting the tobacco industry in charge of smoke-free spaces. This isn’t ‘big society’, it’s big business.”

Of course this idiotic approach to masterminding food safety policy goes on America as well, where the fascist corporate takeover of our regulatory agencies is traveling at lightning speed. Last October, Congress approved Obama’s nomination of a Mars candy bar executive — Catherine Woteki — as the USDA’s undersecretary for research, education, and economics.

Woteki also held high-level positions at the USDA under Bill Clinton, where she held the same position she now holds under Obama’s administration. During her tenure with the Clinton Administration, Woteki co-wrote a paper on “The Administration’s Responsibility to the Consumer” in regards to GM seeds. The paper omits potential ecological and public-health issues regarding GM seeds, and concludes that “the government’s only responsibility to the public concerning the technology is to support it vigorously.”

Earlier this year, Obama appointed former pesticide lobbyist Islam Siddiqui, to be chief agricultural negotiator in the office of the U.S. trade representative. Dr. Siddiqui’s nomination was opposed by the Center for Biological Diversity and more than 80 other environmental, small-farm, and consumer groups. More than 90,000 concerned citizens contacted the White House and Senate to oppose the nomination.

And current FDA Food Safety Czar, Michael Taylor, is the former Monsanto executive who crafted the FDA’s GMO friendly policy while serving as the FDA’s Deputy commissioner for policy. Taylor also wrote the FDA’s guidelines on recombinant bovine growth hormone (rBGH), banning dairies from labeling their milk “rBGH Free“.

As Benito Mussolini once said before he was shot and hung upside down on a meathook: “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.”

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