The Smarter Lunchrooms Sphere of Influence

This post follows “Who Hates Online Activism?” in chronicling the disappointing history of Brian Wansink, Ph.D., a man entrusted by the U.S. government to psychologically manipulate the behavior of children and teenagers in school cafeterias, and influence them to choose healthful foods that do not promote obesity.

No fault is to be found in any of this… if the Smarter Lunchrooms theories actually play out. Do they? And if this very soft science knows what it’s talking about. Does it? Through the efforts of Bettina Elias Siegel, the public has learned about a complicated and perhaps shady situation.

Siegel notes that members of the School Nutrition Association receive regular newsletters whose contents include hints on how to inspire better eating habits at school meals. Who could be mad at that? One might wonder. Of course, for anyone who presumes to hand out tips, a problem is inherent. Saying “Try this… or this… or this…” cannot help but attract a certain amount of negative emotional fallout. Many friendly pieces of advice for parents are launched, and not all of them will land.

People are different, and so are families, kids, mothers, fathers, cultures, neighborhoods, finances, schools, and numerous other factors. No advisor or life coach can guarantee that all their helpful tips will be effective. A lot of things don’t work, and nothing works for everybody. But as any baffled and beleaguered parent will acknowledge, when something does work, it can be a life-changer.

How influential is the Smarter Lunchrooms creed?

Regarding the research from which its wisdom nuggets are mined, critics of the Smarter Lunchrooms movement have been pointing out with increasing frequency that it is, in some instances, embarrassingly threadbare. Also, despite calling itself one, Smarter Lunchrooms is not a movement — not in the sense of an innovative idea that sparks the imaginations of various interested parties who clamor to join up.

No, it’s a top-down thing, not decreed but strongly urged by the Department of Agriculture, as Siegel reminds us:

[T]he USDA has invested millions more in the program, including offering individual grants to schools to help them implement Wansink’s findings. The USDA holds Wansink’s ideas in such high esteem that his Smarter Lunchroom Initiative has even been woven into federal regulations.

This refers to the sections of the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, which warned local schools that the minimum expectation was for them to review the Smarter Lunchrooms materials because they are…

[…] shown to improve student participation in the school meals program while encouraging consumption of more whole grains, fruits, vegetables, and legumes, and decreasing plate waste.

Public Schools pretty much have to participate in such programs, and when they do, they are under an obligation to follow the guidelines and uphold the tenets. It’s fine to try things out, but government fiat tends to prematurely enshrine a philosophy’s ideas as the ultimate criteria for goodness, which is perhaps not such a great idea. Siegel writes,

Similarly, the USDA’s HealthierUS Schools Challenge, launched in 2010 to encourage healthier school environments, is now called “HealthierUS School Challenge: Smarter Lunchrooms,” and to qualify for bronze, silver or gold certification, schools must now demonstrate that they’re using Wansink’s techniques in at least six areas in their cafeterias.

Also, Wansink controlled the narrative around children’s school food by being director of Cornell University’s Food and Brand Lab. The institution studies, and often influences, “how people perceive, consume, and think about food.”

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “BREAKING: Can We Trust the Data Behind ‘Smarter Lunchrooms?’,” TheLunchTray.com, 02/14/17
Source: “Local School Wellness Policy Implementation Under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010,” FederalRegister.gov, 07/29/16
Source: “A Popular Diet-Science Lab Has Been Publishing Really Shoddy Research,” TheCut.com, 02/08/17
Image by Indi Samarajiva/CC BY 2.0

Who Hates Online Activism?

There is more to say about Brian Wansink, Ph.D., the chief inventor and proponent of Smarter Lunchrooms, which took over the presentation aspect of lunch in about 30,000 American public schools. Independent columnist Bettina Elias Siegel became very interested in examining Wansink’s work.

Siegel put a lot of thought and experience into zeroing in on a very specific aspect of his research, and his regressive attitudes about ordinary people who are picky about what kinds of junk they eat. Rather than encourage the curious and the concerned to educate themselves with the marvelous resources of the Internet, he grouched, “Reading about food ingredients on the Web. It’s one of the worst things you can do if you want the facts…”

Really? Could it be that parents, educators, policymakers, and other interested parties who look for nutrition information at the websites of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation or the Mayo Clinic are misguided fools? In fact, Wansink’s own multitudinous studies are published via the Web. As a researcher and writer, how does it make any sense for him to diss the very medium that brings his work to the world’s attention?

It’s all about controlling the narrative

Honestly now, who is it that really hates the Internet? Actually, that attitude belongs more appropriately to Big Junk Food, as Siegel points out. Online sources are where citizens get all the inside information about things like how the world was lied to for years about the damage done by sugar, and the sleazy practices of fast-food merchants.

Online is the place where outraged citizens can band together to create change. Let’s go to Siegel’s endorsement:

To the great consternation of the processed food industry, it is becoming ever more apparent that the Internet and social media are extremely powerful tools for advancing various food-related causes, from aiding grassroots activism, to spreading viral videos promoting sustainable food practices or decrying children’s junk food advertising, to making possible online petitions like the one I started in 2012, which garnered a quarter of a million signatures and within nine days led the USDA to change one of its school food policies.

Anyone with a food-related sense of mission would do well to take cyber-activism lessons from Siegel.

The wellsprings of power

But how did one man, Dr. Brian Wansink, gain so much control over what goes on in public school cafeterias? Again, Siegel has a viable theory. It was mainly due to fortuitous timing. In 2010 The New York Times published an opinion piece written by Dr. Wansink, David R. Just, and Joe McKendry which, Siegel says…

[…] happened to appear in the Times just three months before President Obama signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, a new law that would greatly improve the nutritional standards for school meals around the country…

A low-cost way to boost student acceptance of healthy food couldn’t have come at a better time, and just one month after the Times piece appeared, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced that it was giving Wansink and his team $1 million to “lead, coordinate and disseminate” more of this highly promising cafeteria design research.

Wow! Talk about a lucky break! Meanwhile, the stars were aligning to provide Dr. Wansink et al with even more good fortune a few years later. In 2014, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack announced that the kitchens of at least 90% of American public schools were successfully meeting the new nutrition standards. An additional $5.5 million grant would help them keep on doing this. The USDA, which had helped to fund the development of Wansink’s program, would continue its financial support:

The grants focus on implementation of Smarter Lunchrooms strategies, a broad toolkit of easy-to-implement, evidence-based practices designed to increase consumption of healthier foods and decrease plate waste…

The Smarter Lunchrooms movement applies practical, research-based principles and strategies that have proven effective at creating an environment that encourages kids to make healthy choices…

These funds may be used to assist the state agency in providing training and technical assistance to school staff in creating Smarter Lunchrooms.

Ironically, the justifications that Vilsack gave for sticking with Smarter Lunchrooms included the same dicey claims that multiple critics later disputed.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Moms, “Food Fears” and the Power of the Internet,” TheLunchTray.com, 07/08/14
Source: “BREAKING: Can We Trust the Data Behind ‘Smarter Lunchrooms?’,” TheLunchTray.com, 02/14/17
Source: “USDA Announces Support for Smarter Lunchrooms,” USDA.gov, 03/12/14
Image by U.S. Dept. of Agriculture/Public Domain

Doubtful Authorities

People have been objecting to the content, methodology, and what they deem the low publication standards of work by Dr. Brian Wansink, in combination with various research partners. These scholars are shaping public opinion, and government funding, around such topics as school gardens, professional chefs in schools, chocolate milk, what is sold by concessions stands, the measurement of food waste, nutrition report cards, and sliced fruit versus whole fruit.

Many of their subjects coincide with the interests of childhood obesity specialists, and are or could be quite useful. Why would a child pick a cupcake instead of a whole apple? We probably know the answer to that. But would a whole-apple-refusing child happily eat a sliced apple?

It depends. The researchers did what Dr. Pretlow always recommends — they asked the kids:

Interviews with children reveal that eating whole fresh fruit can be difficult for those with small mouths or braces. Older girls find whole fruits messy and unattractive to eat.

The idea of supplying each child with a “nutrition report card” may sound good at first, but the cumulative effect of that much surveillance — and that much reporting back to parents — would probably be detrimental. Some ideas that sound unnecessary or absurd to the taxpayer might prove very helpful in preventing obesity.

Others, even if they seize public imagination, might turn out to be useless or worse. Even the craziest notion could lead to an amazing revelation. But the weirder the idea, the more important a solid scientific investigation would be.

The Lunch Tray lady

Let’s get back to Bettina Elias Siegel, the citizen blogger who became seriously interested in Dr. Wansink about 10 years ago. In 2014 she reviewed one of his studies (with two co-authors) titled “Ingredient-Based Food Fears and Avoidance: Antecedents and Antidotes.”

Why do consumers, and especially mothers, develop strong negative feelings about certain ingredients including, but not limited to, “sodium, fat, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, MSG and lean finely textured beef”? The first five on the list are amply familiar to Childhood Obesity News readers.

The other part of the researchers’ curiosity, and rather ominously, related to “what the food industry and government can do about it.” (Why the food industry and/or the government should do anything, one way or the other, about these largely justifiable food fears is a separate question.)

And isn’t the whole attitude rather patronizing? After all, plenty of experts have spoken out against HFCS, sugar, and many other substances, with what appears to be good reason. Oh, by the way, the study was partly funded by the Corn Refiners Association. Siegel writes,

While the study never takes a position on whether that particular “food fear” is legitimate […] Wansink’s own statements in the media would certainly be reassuring to anyone worried about HFCS — and that alone is troubling given the CRA’s financial ties to the study.

What was Wansink saying to the media? Disingenuous baloney like,“It’s kind of crazy. How do these things get started and get traction without really any evidence at all?” But we are not here to steal Siegel’s thunder. This treatise of hers really deserves to be read and fully appreciated, containing as it does a sterling example of why many professionals look upon Wansick’s studies with a jaundiced eye.

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “Smarter Lunchrooms Movement (SML),” SnapedToolkit.org, undated
Source: “Pre-Sliced Fruit in School Cafeterias” AJPMOnline.org, 05/01/13
Source: “Moms, ‘Food Fears’ and the Power of the Internet,” TheLunchTray.com, 07/08/14
Images (left to right): Marco Verch, Frédéric Bisson, Rodrigo Denúbila/(CC BY 2.0)

The Hinterlands of Science

The childhood obesity field does not generate many scandals, but when one occurs, somehow it seems worse than the disreputable doings in other areas of research. In the previous post, we learned that Smarter Lunchrooms co-inventor Brian Wansink has been called out for, among other things, reverse-engineering data from a “failed study which had null results” into a half-baked research paper. Wansink has also been criticized for possessing a “cavalier attitude toward theory and apparent willingness to hack statistics into something publishable.”

Those phrases came from Elizabeth Nolan Brown, who expressed great concern over the fact that by the time some 29,000 public schools in America had adopted the Smarter Lunchrooms game plan, only one outside study of it had appeared in the literature. She also found it upsetting that Wansink had agreed to review the data from what some critics regarded as questionable studies, then deleted his blog post where that offer was on record.

Another of Brown’s points is that although the method is touted as low-cost, “we are shelling out all sorts of money and government resources to incentivize activity with no measurable benefit (all while creating new administrative positions and layers of bureaucracy to oversee these efforts).”

Other critics of Smarter Lunchrooms

There is a general feeling, among Smarter Lunchrooms dissidents, that settling on that paradigm has stalled or prevented research into other modalities that might more effectively persuade children to choose nutritious foods. In particular, universal acceptance of Smarter Lunchrooms might not be the optimal path toward reducing obesity in children.

In the larger arena of psychological research, naysayers have been picking away at all kinds of studies whose conclusions were once considered acceptable. Psychology is, after all, a “soft” science, and its practitioners, and especially its innovators, must undergo very strict scrutiny from the “hard” science scholars. They want research that can be verified and reproduced. They especially want numbers to add up, which is unfortunately not always the case in papers published by Wansink and various collaborators.

One special critic

Here is where the story gets really interesting. One of the earliest skeptics was not an accredited scientist, but a citizen blogger (and mother of school-age children), Bettina Elias Siegel. Her online activity has demonstrated the power that “ordinary” parents and caring members of the public can wield.

As far back as 2010, Siegel’s blog, The Lunch Tray, mentioned Smarter Lunchrooms in a neutral, reportorial context. But then, she got to thinking about it, and in the following year, emailed a question to Brian Wansink. The “nudges” his team had invented may have inspired kids to put more fruits and vegetable on their plates — and that sounded intriguing — but were those healthier items actually consumed?

The result was a phone interview, from which these replies are quoted:

BW: In some lunch room studies we did also do plate waste studies, but looking at aggregate trash isn’t really instructive since, for example, we don’t know how many people took all those green beans we find in the trash can. So instead we’ve also done some individual plate waste studies, but [for practical reasons] we do it on only a sub-sample of the population.

Siegel said that she had personally observed elementary school children who voluntarily chose fruits and vegetables in the lunch line, only to ignore and discard them.

BW: Oh, well elementary kids are a different animal. They don’t have any frontal lobe. They just randomly do things and certainly there’s no self-reflection of attribution there. That kicks in big time in junior high and high school and then we see huge effects. It’s so much more rich then because older kids are thinking, so then you can use the thinking in your favor. In elementary school there are certain things that can be done, but a lot of them won’t work.

Wansink mentioned that he himself had three children, all under five years old, and that his methods did help at home.

(To be continued…)

Your responses and feedback are welcome!

Source: “The Junk Science Behind ‘Smarter Lunchrooms’,” Reason.com, 08/29/17
Source: “Interview with Dr. Brian Wansink, Master of Lunchroom Trickery,” TheLunchTray.com, 03/31/11
Image by Bettina Elias Siegel