Veggies, Soft Drinks Divide DeLauro & Brown

When Michelle Obama headlines a rally at Wilbur Cross Thursday, a man named James Brown won’t be applauding the lower-calorie changes she has brought to the school cafeteria.

Rosa DeLauro, the woman Brown hopes to unseat from Congress, plans to be right up on stage cheering on the first lady.

Brown is a Republican, after all, and DeLauro a Democrat. And Obama is coming to Wilbur Cross to boost the reelection campaign of Democratic Gov. Dannel P. Malloy.

Obama’s crusade for more healthful school lunches — which have led cafeteria across the country to serve leaner, lower-salt, fresher food to students — turns out to one of many dividing points between Brown and DeLauro as they both seek New Haven’s Third U.S. District Congressional seat in the Nov. 4 election. DeLauro has held the seat since 1991.

Brown, a conservative, and DeLauro, a leading Congressional liberal, differ on a wide range of issues from taxation to immigration to education. (Click on their websites here and here for details on those issues.)

Perhaps their most detailed and stark, not to mention interesting, differences turn out to revolve around health policy — from school lunches to Ebola, from sugary soft drinks to Obamacare’s effect on … tanning salons. Those differences emerged in separate coffeehouse conversations with the candidates.

The ​“Food Police”

Michelle Obama’s name came up early in the interview with Brown (pictured). He spoke of his experiences as a math teacher (recently retired) and track coach (still in the job) at Stratford’s Bunnell High School. Ever since Congress passed a healthful school-lunch bill championed by the first lady, he complained, athletes have had too little to eat, and uneaten fruit piles up and gets wasted.

DeLauro championed the law, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, the first major change in school-lunch standards in 15 years. Since 2012, it has required schools to serve fruits and vegetables for lunch, low- and nonfat milk, more whole grains, and less salt and saturated and trans fats. The goal in part is to tackle an obesity epidemic.

The act is an example of misguided government overreach, Brown argued over a berry smoothie at the B Natural (formerly Woodland) Cafe on Sherman’s Alley.

At Bunnell, he saw uneaten food get thrown out because kids didn’t like it, he said. And, he continued, athletes needed more than the limit of 850 calories.

“Everything’s whole-grain. The cookies are whole-grain!” Brown said. He said the cafeteria workers have been forced into the role of ​“food police,” pushing fruit and vegetables on uninterested students.

“I’m a cross-country coach. The kids are running eight, nine, 10 miles after school. They come to me or the football team — they have no energy. They have to go to the convenience store [for after-school snacks] or bring their own stuff,” Brown remarked.

“You’re an 80-pound freshman who does nothing after-school eating the same food as a senior 300-pound lineman going to practice.”

If obesity afflicts, say, 25 percent of the student population, Brown said, ​“what about that 75 percent” who aren’t?

DeLauro responded that the law is important, and it’s working. She said obesity is leading to a host of health problems like diabetes. She has fought efforts to dilute the standards.

“This is about nutrition. We have a serious public-health problem,” she said over a cup of tea at Cafe Java on Elm Street.

“My granddaughter Sadie would do nothing but eat chocolate all day. Should I not say something?”

DeLauro cited this Harvard study to rebut anecdotal arguments that food waste has increased under the law; the study found it hasn’t. The study also found that kids are eating 23 percent more fruits and 16.2 percent more vegetables.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) has done a good job of working with local schools to tweak the program without lowering nutritional standards, DeLauro said.

Hold The Slurpee

The proper role of government also underlay the candidates’ disagreement about one of DeLauro’s signature efforts: Her continuing quest to tax beverages a penny for every teaspoon of processed sugar or high-fructose corn syrup. She calls her proposed law the Sugar-Sweetened Beverages Tax (SWEET) Act.

“I view sugar as the new tobacco,” DeLauro said. ​“Years ago we knew tobacco was killing people and was addictive. We made a determination as a nation that raising prices on cigarettes was going to save lives.” And it did.

Now turbo-sweetened sodas and juices are leading to an epidemic of diabetes, costing the nation $90 billion a year in treatment, she said.

“I know how tough it is to talk about a tax. People say, ​‘It’s never going to happen.’ Years ago people told me I wasn’t going to get menu labeling [requiring chain restaurants to display calorie counts] passed. I was the crazy aunt in the attic.” Under a provision in the Affordable Care Act (aka Obamacare), those labels will soon start appearing, and ​“you’ll make a decision” about what food to buy armed with important information, she said.

DeLauro noted how higher-sugar sodas like Coke cost half of, say, a Tropicana Pure Premium orange juice. That leads lower-income shoppers and others on a tight budget to have to purchase less-healthful fare, she argued.

Brown argued that consumers can be trusted to make their own choices about whether to drink sugary drinks without being taxed.

He also argued that the SWEET Act would harm the very low-income shoppers DeLauro seeks to help.

“‘The healthy stuff is too expensive, so we’ll make the crummy stuff more expensive.’ The logic escapes me,” Brown said. ​“If poor people can’t purchase the healthier drinks now, how is raising the price going to help?”

DeLauro responded that she’d like to see the agricultural subsidies that now go toward keeping the price of high-fructose corn syrup go instead to supporting local farmers who grow fruits and vegetables. ​“Just because you’re poor,” she said, ​“that doesn’t mean your health should suffer.”

Flight Attendance

The two candidates took different stands on the number-one public health issue of the day: the spread of Ebola. Like some Republicans in Washington, Brown called for suspending commercial airline flights to the U.S. from African nations where the contagious deadly disease has spread.

DeLauro called the idea a mistake, citing medical experts who say such a ban will hurt more than help: It would limit the flight of health workers or supplies to Africa to help fight the disease. Meanwhile, people possibly infected with Ebola will merely fly elsewhere before catching a different flight to the U.S. — and therefore be harder to track once they get here.

“People will find their way. They’ll go to Kenya” first, she said.

Brown responded that the ban would still lead to fewer people coming into the country. Non-commercial flights can still be arranged to ferry workers and supplies, he argued.

DeLauro said the crisis highlights the ongoing need to reverse devastating cuts in federal support for medical research (which have hit Yale particularly hard). She said one of her proudest accomplishments in office has been helping to double funding for the National Institutes of Health between 1998 and 2003. As a member of the Democratic minority, she has now been in the position of fighting against Republican-led cutbacks since 2010. Connecticut has in the past year suffered a 37 percent cut in money for hospital preparedness as well, she said. The Department of Health and Human Services’ hospital preparedness program has been cut overall 44 percent since 2010 — a cut in the very program that enables hospitals to tackle new threats like Ebola, she said.

Tanned, Or Burned?

Brown would vote to repeal Obamacare (why should he have to pay for maternity coverage?), while DeLauro (pictured) called it a success (“one of the proudest votes I’ve ever cast,” leading to insurance for millions, equalized costs for women, life-saving preventive care). No surprise there — many Republicans and Democrats across the country have been having that debate.

Here in New Haven, the debate centered partly on tanning. (See the video at the top of the story to watch.) Brown said one of the law’s failures has been to shut down tanning salons. The law slapped a 10 percent fee on the salons to raise money, and ​“45 percent of the tanning salon businesses have gone under,” Brown said, attributing that fact to the fee.

“2009, there were 18,000 tanning salons. As of 2014 there are only 10,000. Sixty-five thousand jobs were lost in the process. Most of them were women. And the 10 percent tax has only produced one-third of the revenue that was projected,” Brown stated.

DeLauro shed no tears for salons. She successfully fought for health warning labels to be displayed at salons because patients can get melanoma, she said.

She called tanning salons a cancer-causing hazard, ​“especially for young girls. They want to have a tan all the time.”