Press Conference With Senator Tom Harkin, Senator Thomas R. Carper And Senator Lisa Murkowski

Press Conference

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SEN. HARKIN: Well, everybody, we'll get started here. Thank you for coming. We're awaiting the arrival of Senator Murkowski. She'll be here very shortly. But we thought, because of things that we've got to do, we've got to get going on this.

Almost two decades ago, Congress enacted the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, the historic legislation that created the "Nutrition Facts" panel that's now standard on all packaged foods. You see it when you go to all your stores and buy anything in a package. Those labels have really transformed the way Americans shop at supermarkets, and they really have given people an invaluable tool for taking charge of their own health.

But in passing the law, Congress had an omission. They exempted restaurants from the bill's nutrition labeling requirements. Well, that might have been okay at that time, but over the years Americans have come to eat more and more at restaurants. And that exemption means that people no longer really know exactly what they're eating in terms of the contents -- the nutritional contents.

Today, Americans spend half their food dollars at restaurants -- half. But we're sort of in the dark as to what we're consuming, because there's no requirement for any nutrition information in chain restaurants. Well, that is about to change.

Thank you, Senator Murkowski, for being here.

SEN. MURKOWSKI: Thank you. Thank you.

SEN. HARKIN: I just started. I just started.

SEN. MURKOWSKI: Good.

SEN. HARKIN: So I just -- it's about to change. Today, I'm pleased to announce a bipartisan agreement that, at long last, will extend nutrition labeling to tens of thousands of chain restaurants across the United States. This agreement has support from public- health groups as well as the restaurant industry. The terms of the agreement are quite simple. Restaurants with 20 or more locations under the same trade name will be required to post caloric information directly on the menu or, in the case of fast-food restaurants, on the menu board.

In addition, restaurants will be required to disclose, at the request of the customer, additional information on other important nutrients, including calories from fat, saturated fat, sodium, sugars, carbohydrates, protein and fiber.

To ensure that consumers have the benefit of consistent information whether they're in Waterloo, Iowa; Wilmington, Delaware; or Fairbanks, Alaska, the agreement requires national uniformity with respect to the nutrients that can be provided on the menu as the -- well as the manner in which they are disclosed. This will ensure that consumers are not confused by state and local standards that may vary from location to location, and it will provide restaurants with a uniform business environment. Think about it like the Nutrition Labeling Act: no matter where you go in the country, no matter what package you buy in the store, it's all the same.

This is truly a landmark agreement. It's a great leap forward in terms of public health and in allowing individuals to take charge of their own health care. As Congress moves forward with comprehensive health reform, we need to put wellness and disease prevention at the heart of that reform. And no question the agreement that we're announcing today is an important building block in our effort to transform America into a wellness society. It will make healthy choice the easy choice. It will empower people to make informed choices in restaurants, the same way they do now in supermarkets.

And let me thank my colleagues here, Senator Carper and Senator Murkowski, for their leadership in this matter. They have been great partners throughout very difficult negotiations that led to this agreement.

I also want to salute the restaurant industry and the public- health community for their very constructive role in shaping this agreement. The negotiations were not easy, but all parties operated in good faith. And I think the result is a win-win-win for public health, for individuals striving to stay healthy and for restaurants.

And with that, I would yield to --

SEN. CARPER: Thank you.

SEN. HARKIN: -- I don't know WHO I yield to. (Laughter.) I yield -- I'll yield to Senator Carper.

SEN. CARPER: Thanks.

I just want to start off -- go -- let's go ahead and step on this -- just go ahead and put those charts up there.

SEN. HARKIN: Well, we already have some there -- oh -- there on the other side.

SEN. CARPER: There you go, Tom. (To staff.) Thanks very much.

I want to begin my remarks today by just saying a real special thank you to Senator Harkin and to our colleague from Alaska Lisa Murkowski.

They -- we are from different parts of the country. We are Democrat. We are Republican. A number of things bind us together, and one of the things that bind us together is our personal commitment to healthy lifestyles, to eating the right foods and to exercising. And --

SEN. MURKOWSKI: Sometimes too much. (Laughter.)

SEN. HARKIN: (Laughing.) Yeah. Yeah.

SEN. CARPER: (Laughs.) Sometimes -- here's a woman who has a bad knee because of a skiing accident. Here's a guy who broke his foot two years ago running a half-marathon. So we know these things can -- and Tom -- here's old Tom, still going strong.

SEN. HARKIN: (Off mike.)

SEN. CARPER: And so he's our role model in all of this.

But as Senator Harkin suggested, we face an epidemic of obesity in this country of ours. Something like a third of all the kids are either overweight or obese. And I'm told that close to 50 percent of the adults in our country are either overweight or overbese (sic) -- or obese.

And we know that the bad things follow when we're overweight and when we're obese. The propensity of -- for people to become -- to have diabetes, to develop diabetes, early or late, is heightened. The likelihood that we'll have heart problems, the likelihood that we'll have problems with our joints, our knees and our ankles -- all of those things we know and we have the empirical data to say bad things happen when we become very large and we don't do anything about our weight and we grow the wrong way.

I'd -- standing before you today, I -- you know, I could say we'll pass this legislation. My hope is the legislation will be part of health-care reform. A lot of health-care reform legislation will focus on wellness and on nutrition, prevention. This is a great piece of that.

But if we did -- just did this piece, however good it is -- and I think it's very good -- that this is all we did, it's not nearly enough in terms of turning the tide against this rising tide of obesity in America. And Tom Harkin and with help from people like Senator Murkowski and myself -- are working to other things as well. And the -- I salute Tom. He's worked on this for years.

But if you look at the -- I think it was in the farm bill when we changed the women-infant-children act -- we actually -- we made changes there to encourage --

SEN. HARKIN: (Off mike) -- vegetables.

SEN. CARPER: -- with the use of federal funds for fruits and vegetables.

SEN. HARKIN: (Off mike.)

SEN. CARPER: When you look at -- go to any school in Delaware, go in there five years ago, you walk through the schools in Delaware -- five years ago you could buy all kinds of sugar -- soft drinks, almost -- relatively little water; you go into the cafeterias to see what's being served at lunch -- not nearly enough fruits and vegetables, way too much carbohydrates and fats.

That's changed in my state. In my state -- every high school in my state, every public high school in my state now has a wellness center. All those wellness centers have a nutritionist.

And so we're fighting this on a lot of areas, with federal legislation, state by state in our schools and with the curriculum, with respect to exercise and all that. So there's -- this is a war that we're fighting on a lot of fronts.

One of the things that we have done and one of the things I was involved in earlier, as I suspect of Tom and Lisa -- been involved in tobacco, trying especially to turn the tide against the use of tobacco, and especially with young people. And we've come to the point in literally in about 10 years in this country where we've made smoking almost unacceptual (sic) -- unacceptable, socially unacceptable.

And my goal -- one of my goals is, with respect to being overweight or to being obese, we really wanted to turn the tide of public opinion so that kind of behavior, overeating, that leads to obesity, is going to be seen by more and more people as socially unacceptable.

Let me just take a minute and we'll look at this chart. If you take a snapshot in 1990, a snapshot in 1998 and another one in 2007. Remember this: Light blue is really good. That shade of blue is not bad. These -- (inaudible) -- of black right here mean we don't have the data.

This is 1990. The light blue says that fewer than 10 percent of the people who live in those states were obese or overweight -- less than 10 percent. And the somewhat darker blue says, in the rest for which we had data, fewer than 15 percent of people are overweight or obese.

That was 18 years ago. That was 18 years ago.

Let's fast-forward to 2007. There's one state here that's -- I don't know if this actually 15 or 19 percent. It says right here -- what would that be? Is it Utah?

SEN. HARKIN: Colorado.

STAFF: Colorado.

SEN. MURKOWSKI: Colorado.

SEN. CARPER: Colorado. Colorado. There you go. Colorado is really the state that may be in the best shape of all. We don't see any more light blue. We don't see any more dark blue. We have data now on every state. We saw a lot of orange. We see this crosshatch here, down here, this orange crosshatch color -- over 30 percent, over 30 percent of the people who live in these states are obese or overweight.

The very best states that we can do -- actually here, besides Colorado, which is 15 to 19 percent overweight, the next best states are the states -- these kind of a tan color. And they're 20 to 24 percent, and that's good today. And then you go back in -- gosh, 17 years before that, nobody, nobody -- we see none of the same colors here. Nobody was as good.

No state is as good now as it was back then. And sometimes a picture is as good as a thousand words. That's a pretty good picture. That's a pretty good picture.

Let's show one more. Let's go back to 1990. About 12 percent of the folks in our country were obese; about 12 percent today. And it's almost been steady, almost a steady rise, till about 2017, we're up to -- oh, gosh, closing in on 30 percent of Americans are obese.

I strongly believe, like Senator Harkin, that consumers should have the tools and the resources that they need to make healthy eating decisions, not just at the grocery store, but also when we dine out. He made the point, we spend about half the money on our food at restaurants these days. And menu labeling is an integral part of addressing the rapidly rising rates of obesity.

Many studies show that over-consumption of 100 to 200 calories per day can cause a significant weight gain. Two hundred calories a day, 365 days a year, is something like 73 calories -- 73,000 calories. Think about that. If we overeat 200 calories a day, 365 days a year, I think that works out to 73,000 calories that we have consumed over what we ought to be consuming. No wonder we've gained so much weight. No wonder that we're so obese.

With that said, over the past year, the three of us have worked together with a number of consumer groups -- God bless them -- the restaurant association and the public health community -- God bless them -- to come up with a compromise that provides important nutrition data for restaurant diners and provides the information we need in the same way.

I just want to say a big thanks -- a big shout-out to Garden Restaurants, to the Coalition for Responsible Nutrition Information, the National Restaurant Association, on the health group side, the Center for Science in the Public Interest and the Morris Foundation in Delaware and down in Florida, for all of your help and for working with us to get us to this point.

Very briefly, here's the four things that -- the cliff notes, if you will, of this legislation. Number one, calories are going to be printed on menus and on menu boards for chain restaurants that have 20 or more restaurants across the country. Number two, other nutrient information is immediately available upon request. We go in; we sit down; we see what the calories are on the board, the calories are on the menu; we ask for information, immediately they've got to give us information, whether it has any sodium, has any sugar, carbohydrates, all kinds of fat. That information has to be immediately available to us, as we prepare to order.

And the other thing that's of note here, we preempt state and local laws pertaining to nutrient content disclosure. And if they're non-chain restaurants in a particular state that want to comply voluntarily with the state -- the federal law -- they don't have to, but if they want to, then they can opt into the preemption clause.

Again, I'll close where I started. This by itself is not going to solve our problem with obesity in America. This, coupled with a lot of other things that we've already done and that we're going to do, are a terrific step in the right direction.

And Tom, I want to thank you for years of perseverance on this, and for giving Lisa and me a chance to work with you. And together, we're going to make a real difference for a lot of -- a lot of young people, and a lot of old people, who want to be skinny people. And they're going to have that chance. (Applause.) Thank you.

SEN. HARKIN: Thanks, Tom. That's great.

SEN. MURKOWSKI: I'm delighted to stand with my colleagues here today -- who are truly, truly committed to making a difference when it comes to how we approach wellness. And you've outlined so dramatically I think for us the changes that we're seeing in this country when it comes to our obesity rates.

And as we debate health care reform and how we move forward with changes, our reality is that we can do a lot of things on paper, we can do a lot of policies, but if people, for a multitude of different reasons, don't kind of take charge and be wise consumers when it comes to what they're putting into their bodies -- whether it's the healthy foods, or whether they're choosing tobacco products which are a known killer -- we can do all the health care reform that we want.

So much of what we've done with this compromise is to help with the educational effort, the awareness. If you don't know that what you're eating is not necessarily good for you, or these are just empty calories, you're not really thinking about it. What you're doing is you're responding to the impulse that says "I'm hungry."

I was looking at your chart. And if you look at where your data starts, there was a time when we all ate a lot more of our dinners, a lot more of our meals, at home. Mom -- this is the stereotype at the time -- mom made a dinner, and you had a vegetable there that she got at the store, and you had a salad, and you had your starches and your dairy product, and you had a well-balanced meal.

And you kind of knew where everything came from. Our world -- fast- forward to today and your statistics -- our world is so much faster, and we're not sitting down at a dinner table where mom has prepared the full-on meal because, you know what? Mom's working a job, and dad's working a job, and the kids are coming from all different quarters, coming from soccer and wherever, and our life is faster.

So what we've got to make sure is that we're providing the information and the tools so that we can be wise about what we are eating; when we do stop as a family at that restaurant -- even if it's a fast-food restaurant, even if it's a sit-down restaurant -- that we know what it is that we are consuming.

So as we talk about the merits of what we have advanced, I think it is important to recognize that there was quite a compromise coming from the different perspectives from the bills that were out there. But I think the reason that we're standing here today is we all agreed on what the goal was. The goal was getting towards a healthier America, reducing our obesity rates, really working towards wellness. So if the goal's the same, by golly, we're going to figure out a way to make it happen.

I just came from a meeting with some folks within the restaurant industry that are absolutely ecstatic today over this news. And one of the reasons, from their perspective, is: Thank you for making our world easier when it comes to printing our menus. They have chains in all states but Alaska -- we're going to work on that one -- and they recognize that they're dealing with 13 different states and 13 different requirements in terms of what must be on that menu. They're looking for some assistance when there's a uniformity of standards. This compromise has dealt with that.

Senator Harkin, you and I have worked very hard on the effort to update the nutritional standards within our schools.

SEN. HARKIN: Schools, yes.

SEN. MURKOWSKI: And we're making great headway on that. And one of these days, we're going to be at another press conference announcing the good news there. But bit by bit, we are gaining in our educational effort to make consumers better understand what they're putting into their bodies and how they can take charge of their own health care and thus reduce their costs and have a happier, healthier lifestyle.

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