Making Progress on Added Sugar: Nutrition Policy After The Pandemic

Panel I: Sugar and Institutions: What’s Been Done, and What Needs to Be Done 

To increase access to and promote consumption of healthier foods and beverages for employees, program participants, people in public custody, students, and citizens, state and local governments are increasingly adopting guidelines for the foods and beverages they purchase, serve, and sell on public property and through their programs—from the prison commissary to meals served to patients at a public hospital. These policies can play a role in reducing consumption of added sugars. This session will explore the experience of implementing sugar reduction through the NYC food standards, the NYC Health and Hospitals Healthy Beverage Initiative, and opportunities to make further progress at the city and state level.

• Nichola Davis, MD, MS, Vice President, Chief Population Health Officer at NYC Health + Hospitals 
• Elizabeth Solomon, MS, RD, Director, Nutrition Policy & Programs, NYC DOHMH  
• Pam Koch, EdD, RD, Executive Director, Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education & Policy, Program in Nutrition

Panel 2: Pouring Rights Contracts at Public Universities 

One way that beverage companies advertise their products is through exclusive marketing agreements with venues and institutions, known as “pouring rights” contracts (PRCs). Many U.S. universities (including the CUNY system and several SUNY campuses) maintain PRCs with Coca-Cola or Pepsi. Through these multi-year, multi-million dollar contracts, universities sell exclusive access to their own students, allowing beverage companies to push sugar-sweetened beverages on students and promote those products with on-campus advertising in exchange for funds. Such contracts allow the beverage companies to benefit from public resources, and effectively make universities corporate partners in the sale of unhealthy drinks. Student activists and public health faculty have begun engaging their universities to reconsider their relationships with Big Soda. This panel will discuss considerations and strategies for engaging university leadership around university pouring rights

• Jen Falbe, PhD, Assistant Professor of Nutrition and Human Development, UC Davis
• Richard Black, PhD, Principal, Quadrant D and former Vice President of Global Nutrition Sciences, PepsiCo
• Kelly Garvey, Research Assistant at University of California Santa Barbara 

Panel 3: (Added) Sugar Warnings at Restaurants 

Returning to normal after the pandemic also means returning to food environments that normalize extreme consumption of sodium (salt) and added sugars. Too often, meals sold at chain restaurants approach or exceed the daily limit of sodium or added sugars in a single serving. A bill now pending in NYC Council for a sugar icon modeled on the sodium icon already in use on NYC menu boards, can help transform food environments by promoting consumer choice and reformulation. How can warnings be designed in a way that centers the needs of New York communities? These communities are disproportionately impacted by diet-related disease, and have the right access to key information about the unhealthy foods served in the food environments they utilize the most.

Communities want successful, effective warnings that will achieve real gains when it comes to public health. Learn how warning icons can help your community recover to a healthier food system and empower individuals to attain our own goals when it comes to restoring our health.