Health Newsletter’s Food Politics Boom With Aging Readers

It has been called everything from competent to alarmist, well written to hyperbolic. Whatever you call it, Nutrition Action Healthletter is selling - big-time.

This month the 16-page newsletter hit a milestone: 1 million subscribers. That’s more than The New Yorker has, or Gourmet or Harper’s Bazaar. And it far surpasses the circulations of other health newsletters.

All across America, subscribers read in their June issue that with Green Giant’s new frozen Green Bean Casserole, “clogged arteries are as close as your microwave” - courtesy of the publishers of Nutrition Action, the Center for Science in the Public Interest.

Most recently known for its skewering of unhealthful restaurant meals, CSPI is less widely known for its newsletter, started in 1974 to get nutritionists interested in the politics of food.

Nowadays it’s four-color and printed on glossy paper, and subscriptions provide more than 70 percent of CSPI’s $13 million annual revenue.

Readers are predominantly female, college-educated, upper-middle-class, white and in their 50s. Therein lies one of the reasons for the newsletter’s success: aging baby boomers.

“The bubble is moving through the population,” says Stephen Schmidt, editor of Nutrition Action. “Here they are, and here we are, and it’s a beautiful intersection. The population is getting older, and they’re naturally thinking about their mortality, and the relationship between diet and disease.”

Then there’s the attraction of what CSPI calls its “sassy, candid” editorial style. Bonnie Liebman, CSPI’s director of nutrition, speculates that the newsletter’s mission to put medical studies into context and give “bottom-line” dietary advice is just what people want.

“We’re not afraid to step on toes,” she says. “If we think people should cut back on hamburgers, we say so.”

It’s just the kind of information that CSPI’s critics don’t like.

Negative nutrition messages don’t get people to change their eating habits permanently, says Rhona Applebaum, executive vice president for scientific and regulatory affairs at the National Food Processors Association. “‘Avoid,’ ‘don’t eat,’ ‘keep away from’ - those types of scare tactics don’t work,” she said.

Nevertheless, the most popular section in the newsletter, according to editor Schmidt, is the back page, called “Just Desserts.” The column highlights two food products; one gets a thumbs-up for its nutritional content, the other a thumbs-down. The phone numbers of the companies are also printed, so readers can call with kudos or complaints.

“Most health newsletters are boring,” Jacobson says. And they’re “very, very cautious in saying something different from the establishment. We’re not.”

Larry Lindner, editor of the Tufts University Health & Nutrition Letter, sees it differently.

“To the degree that CSPI and Nutrition Action serve as a wake-up call to people that they ought to think more carefully about their diet … they do a stupendous job,” he said. “But to the degree that they treat food as medicine and leave out the pleasure principle … they turn people away from healthful eating.”

Marion Nestle, chair of the department of nutrition and food studies at New York University, who served on CSPI’s board of directors for five years, agrees that “it would be nice if they had a better taste for food.” But she said that Nutrition Action is carefully reported and fun to read.

Sure, “they exaggerate and overstate,” Nestle added, “but I’m happy to see it exaggerated, since most of the news is in the opposite direction.”

xxxx