ColumnYou can’t outrun a bad diet, but big food companies want you to think you can.

A healthy lifestyle is one that involves eating well and getting regular physical activity. You don’t need to be a scientist to know that. But are we sold a myth that is only a half truth?

In a world with skyrocketing obesity rates, we are constantly looking for the solution. Do people just need to be more active? Do they just need to make sure they only consume a certain amount of calories every day? An editorial in the British Journal of Sports Medicine points the finger at big food companies, saying that they have mislead us in the thinking that maintaining a healthy weight is all about calorie counting and exercising.

The authors write that “members of the public are drowned by an unhelpful message about maintaining a ‘healthy weight’ through calorie counting, and many still wrongly believe that obesity is entirely due to lack of exercise. This false perception is rooted in the Food Industry’s Public Relations machinery, which uses tactics chillingly similar to those of big tobacco.”

It’s true that many are more focused on how many calories they consume as opposed to where those calories come from. A 300-calorie fast food burger and a 300-calorie meal made from lentils and leafy greens is an entirely different thing. And if you eat that fast food burger, going for a workout afterwards isn’t necessarily going to help you either.

The authors of the editorial note that in an analysis of worldwide sugar availability, it was shown that for every excess 150 calories of sugar (ie what’s in a can of cola), type 2 diabetes was 11 times more prevalent, compared to when those 150 calories came from fat or protein. Where your calories come from matters.

But big food businesses have big advertising, marketing and lobbying budgets, and they can push any message that they want. “Coca Cola, who spent $3.3 billion on advertising in 2013, pushes a message that ‘all calories count’; they associate their products with sport, suggesting it is ok to consume their drinks as long as you exercise,” write the authors. “However science tells us this is misleading and wrong. It is where the calories come from that is crucial. Sugar calories promote fat storage and hunger. Fat calories induce fullness or ‘satiation’.”

Of course, it’s much easier for these companies to put the blame on the individual consumer than it is to change their business model. If you’re gaining weight it’s your fault for not counting your calories and not exercising enough. It’s certainly not the fault of the company that’s pumping sugar, salt and fat into the economy at enormous rates.

At some point, if we really want to deal with the public health issue then we are going to need to take a stand for government intervention, much like how we dealt with tobacco. But as the authors of the article note, the food industry uses the exact same tactics used by the tobacco industry; tactics that allowed the industry to keep functioning unchecked for decades. “The tobacco industry successfully stalled government intervention for 50 years starting from when the first links between smoking and lung cancer were published. This sabotage was achieved using a ‘corporate playbook’ of denial, doubt, confusing the public and even buying the loyalty of bent scientists, at the cost of millions of lives.”

Want to live a healthy lifestyle? Eat well, get regular exercise. But also, stand up against the big food companies that continue to make us sick.

We all need to take personal responsibility for our health, but these companies should take some corporate responsibility as well.

Related on EcoSalon

Surprise, It’s 2015 and Fast Food is Still Bad for You: Foodie Underground

Fast Food, Fast Fashion, It’s All About Choice: Foodie Underground

Food Marketing: Are Food Ads the New Political Ads?

This is the latest installment of Anna Brones’ weekly column at EcoSalon: Foodie Underground, an exploration of what’s new and different in the underground movement, and how we make the topic of good food more accessible to everyone. More musings on the topic can be found at www.foodieunderground.com.

Image: Scorpion and Centaurs

The post Are Big Food Companies Pushing an Exercise and Obesity Myth? Foodie Underground appeared first on EcoSalon.

Acai berries! Kale! Spirulina! Quinoa!

Oh the world of superfoods, where some foods just get a better reputation than others. But when it comes to healthy eating, are superfoods actually doing us more harm than good?

The first problem with superfoods is that there is actually no definition of what a superfood is. In fact, if anything, the term “superfood” is used more for marketing purposes than health. Be honest: if you see “superfood” on the label of something at the market, you consider buying it now don’t you?

Don’t worry, we’ve all been there. In a time where fast food rules the world, agribusiness keeps us eating anything and everything made from corn, and obesity rates are skyrocketing, it’s no surprise that we’re looking for ways to eat better, and incorporate more healthy ingredients into our diets. That’s why the “superfoods” term has caught on so well.

In general, superfoods are foods that are “nutrient powerhouses.” In other words, they pack a nutrient punch; full of lots of vitamins and minerals and all the good things that a body on the Standard American Diet (yes, it’s SAD) naturally wants more of, even if it’s on a subconscious level. When it comes down to it, there are a lot of foods that could qualify as a superfood. We live in a culture of “bigger and better” and just like we want fast cars and larger houses, we want food that ups the ante on all the other foods.

However, the problem with superfoods is that the concept gets us focusing on individual ingredients instead of diets as a whole. No one is going to argue that eating kale or blueberries isn’t good for you, but individually targeting certain foods distracts our attention from not only a lot of other foods that are good for us – hello, why doesn’t anyone care about celery root?! – but also it encourages a mentality of “if only I eat a few extra good things, I can continue eating whatever I like.”

Let me break it down for you: popping exotic berries into a smoothie is not going to make you immortal, or even get you to the age of 90, and it certainly isn’t going to offset the negative effects of a poor diet. Sure, you may eat a raw acai bowl for breakfast every morning, but if that’s followed by a can of Coca-Cola at lunch, then you can forget about taking advantage of all the nutritional benefits of your morning meal.

When we put certain individual ingredients on a  pedestal, it also keeps us from thinking locally. This is often the problem with superfoods marketing, as you’ll commonly find lots of foods that come from nowhere near your backyard. Let’s take goji berries for example. Do you know where goji berries come from? They may be branded as the Himalayan superfood, invoking images of tranquil fields in the foothills of mountains, but the reality is that the majority of goji crops hail from industrial fields in Northwestern China. And hey, even if we get sick of that superfood, the food marketing world will always come up with another exotic option to replace it with. Kakadu plum anyone?

While superfoods may seem like a healthy alternative to all the chips, cookies and other processed foods on the market, don’t let yourself think that these food companies are operating in your best interest; they’re applying savvy marketing principles just like all the other food companies and brands on the market.

Superfoods can, and do, get recalled – Sunburst Superfoods had to recall a raw carob powder earlier this year – and companies that market them definitely get reprimanded for mismarketing their so-called incredible benefits. One of the more notable cases was POM, the seller of pomegranate juice, who the FDA charged for making “false and unsubstantiated claims that their products will prevent or treat heart disease, prostate cancer, and erectile dysfunction.” Proof that you can never believe the marketing claims on food packaging, even if the food product in question appears to be a health food.

Superfoods in and of themselves aren’t hurting us, but the concept and marketing of superfoods certainly is, so much so that it’s probably time that we simply got rid of the term “superfoods” entirely. “I don’t believe there is such a thing as a superfood,” Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University, told the Washington Post. “All plant foods — fruits, vegetables, nuts, grains — have useful nutrients. The whole point about diets is to vary food intake, because the nutrient contents of various foods differ and complement each other.”

In Europe, the use of the term “superfood” is in fact banned, and if we know one thing about the Europeans it’s this: they tend to have a much better relationship to food than we do, certainly a more well balanced one.

But beyond the effects (or lack thereof) of superfoods on our health, there’s something else that’s even more important to consider: the effect on the people that grow them. The popularity of quinoa has made it so that poorer people in Peru and Bolivia, quinoa’s native growing spot, can’t afford the grain that once sustained them.

Our obsession with exotic superfoods also has a negative affect on growers back here at home. As Tom Philpott pointed out in an article in Mother Jones last year, “The domestic blueberry, for example, is periodically (and justifiably) marketed as a superfood, and in 2012, products featuring blueberries as a primary ingredient saw their sales nearly quadruple. But they only raked in $3.5 million—less than 2 percent of açaí-based product sales.” In a world where so many people are talking about eating more local and supporting communities closer to home, do these kind of sales statistics make any sense to you? It’s as if we have to say, “sorry blueberry farmers, your berries just aren’t as sexy as the ones that come from far away.”

Want to eat healthy? It’s not a well-packaged bundle of berries that’s going to be your solution. Skip the aisle full of health claims, and walk right over to that produce aisle and fill your basket with fresh fruits and vegetables.

Eat whole grains. Make your daily diet of real foods that don’t come from the other side of the world.

Related on EcoSalon

Kakadu Plum: The New Superfood?

Can We Stop Talking About Superfoods? Foodie Underground

Homemade Breakfast Bar with Goji Berries

Image: theglobalpanorama

The post Are Superfoods Actually Bad for Us? appeared first on EcoSalon.

ColumnDisgusted by overwhelming portions of salacious fare served up on the Internet? In today’s “click, monitor, push” information-marketing world, what we “see” is about more than algorithms—it’s about who we are.

I looked at a leaked photo and saw a naked celebrity. To be honest, while I didn’t realize what was on the other end of the hyperlink, there was probably enough information surrounding it that I should have known better. It was an impulse move (part curious, part prurient, part lazy) and I’m a little disgusted with myself for not thinking through my click. It’s not something I’m continuing to beat myself up about, but nevertheless, the event was indeed criminal and my choice was complicit. I’m sorry I did it.

I’m usually better than that when it comes to sensationalism and/or potential privacy breaches (of celebs or otherwise). I didn’t watch the Ray Rice wife-beating elevator video or the ISIL beheadings, I avoid “Read this Fucking Story!” headlines like the plague and I try to train a hypercritical eye on anything dubbed “trending.” I do this because at the end of the day, I know that in many ways I am what I click, and I do my best to exert at least a modicum of control over my intentions and actions when it comes to media consumption.

The consumption-equals-self concept (I think it began with “you are what you eat”) is not a new phenomenon, particularly in the media marketplace. I’m one of those before-and-after folk who, unlike the digital natives, came of age without an Internet, reading paper-based things and taking in what I could through a mere four or six channels on a rabbit-eared television set. Even then, though, I knew that my media interactions had implications beyond the ink stains on my fingers and my Sonny & Cher-strained eyeballs. I knew that my choices percolated up to sinister marketing meetings where decisions were made as to who I was (i.e., my demographic) and what I would be sold going forward.

In some ways, it seemed like a fair deal. I spoke with my choices. The powers that be listened and responded. Quid pro quo, right? (I confess that I secretly wished we were a Nielsen family.) But, still, there was something safely delayed about these transactions. It took time for Madison Avenue, the networks and the rest to understand my habits, construct customized offerings and deliver what I seemed to be willing to view. I assumed I’d eventually get more of what I thought I wanted, but the Mad Men and Media Merchants were somehow remote; there was some solace in the lack of immediacy.

Today’s media is a different beast. Think the above mindspace-commerce formula on steroids. Better still, on crack. As I busily click away, information is instantaneously gathered, crunched and fed back to me in the form of related content. If I click on naked celebs, violent videos, popular tripe and crap like that, then boom!—more naked celebs, violent videos, popular tripe and crap like that. Simple, even for us nerds who know nothing about how the intertubes do the voodoo they do.

Today, we are each in the business of creating sophisticated DIY echo chambers of information. There’s a one-to-one relationship between our surfing and its feedback, with virtually no play in the wheel. Liberal information for liberals. Conservative for conservatives. Shopping for shoppers. Not slowly but surely, but here and now, again and again, in real time until you buy or, as the case may be, buy in.

Smile for the Clickbait

Okay, so it’s no secret, nor is it surprising, that countless soulless algorithms are digesting my info and creating a customized and finely tuned online media environment just for me. And this isn’t always a bad thing. Aside from my Nielsen aspirations, I’m okay when options for that end table I’ve been valiantly surfing for or the first-edition Hemingway I’ve been staring at for months on eBay magically appear in my Facebook feed. And who needs to see those inane (not-my-bent) political ravings or overzealous (not-my-belief-system) religious messages. Not me. And through tech wizardry, I don’t have to, right? Huzzah!

But there’s more to it than that, isn’t there? If we stare a little cross-eyed at our newsfeeds (wherever they reside), we can see what amounts to a selfie—a homemade portrait that depicts something between an accurate view of who we are and some distorted caricature of our likeness. Beyond the algorithmic give and take, the scrolling image reflects something about us and our desires. It’s been said that, if nothing else, we can decide what we pay attention to. In the end, such choices amount to no small thing.

This is not to say that these choices are always easy ones. When the video surfaced of NFL running back Ray Rice assaulting his wife in an elevator, for example, I faced a decision: To click or not to click? No? Maybe, but consider that its going viral led to a much-needed culture storm that continues to reverberate beyond the football league; the phenomenon of millions of people watching that recorded crime translated into critical knowledge and a subsequent national uproar.

But managing my relationship with information is also critical. Can I understand an issue without joining an ugly horde of voyeurs? Can I develop an internal brain-muscle memory that tells me that when I look at something I’ll be participating in a media marketing measurement system that will not only blow back to my own info trough but to the world’s as well?

Consider the birth of widespread disintermediated information flow, which in large part came in the form of the website known as Digg. The site (and its once-ubiquitous share buttons) was a prototype for grander social media to come (Facebook, Twitter and the like) and a crucial turning point in the democratization of editorial decision-making. (Full disclosure: My brother was CEO at the time.) In its 2009 heyday, Digg boasted 45 million users.

It more or less worked like this: When you came across something on the Web that interested you, you could Digg it by clicking a button associated with the story. This acted essentially as a thumbs-up vote, which would then determine its rise or fall on the Digg homepage. This meant users chose what was top-priority news and what wasn’t. The upside was enormous: Events previously buried by jaded, ignorant or bought editorial gatekeepers could jump to the top of the pops.

As with most big ideas, however, there’s a double edge to this otherwise gallant swordplay. If the world is watching, say, the Arab Spring or a maybe an important political debate, and that activity is instantly measured and widely promoted based on its popularity, that’s a good thing. But what about mob rule? I remember when naked Paris Hilton photos rose to the top of the Web world (with Digg’s help, by the way). What else was happening on that day? I wonder.

Mirror, Mirror

In a world (go ahead, say it like the guy on the movie trailers—there’s a dubious air about all of this) where we clickers increasingly decide what’s news, what’s worth looking at and what’s not, we more or less get exactly what we deserve. We can debate all millennium about the advantages or disadvantages of such people power (mob rule?) or algorithm-based marketing (stalking?), but the truth is, in one form or another, these formulas have been in play since well before the penny press—and they’re here to stay. Bitching about it is kind of like cooking dinner and then complaining that the chef is a talentless hack who’s serving up a bunch of slop.

What’s important, then, is how what we see on our screens is up to us as a culture of users—which, of course, means it’s ultimately up to us as individuals. There’s black and white—I should not have opened the naked celeb link. It shouldn’t have taken much thought to know what I was doing and thus supporting. And then there’s nuance—I can follow certain stories (domestic violence vis-à-vis Ray Rice or Middle East policy vis-à-vis the ISIL insanity) without voting for the dissemination of grotesque and sometimes even criminal bits and bytes on the Web.

What’s required for navigating this, on a personal level, is taking a moment to reflect before we open a link. Why do we blindly click? Do we think about the blowback that will be mainlined not only into our own info-intake valves, but into our culture as a whole? All told, our impulses are too often sadly unmediated: Curious. (What’s everyone going on about?) Prurient. (“She’s kind of hot. What’s behind this curtain?”) Lazy. (Cool! Click!) Going forward, I’m going to try to do a better job of casting my brain-space ballot. And the next time I feel the urge to get all indignant about “information” that comes my way, I’ll keep this in mind: Often, we get just what we ask for.

Scott Adelson is EcoSalon’s Senior Editor of HyperKulture, a monthly column that explores opening cultural doors to initiate personal change. He is also the author of InPRINT, which reviews and discusses books, new and old. You can reach him at scott at adelson dot org and follow him @scottadelson on Twitter.

Related on EcoSalon

HyperKulture: Multiple Personality Order – Embracing Your Inner Yours

HyperKulture: Living in the Past – You Can’t Go Back… Why Would You Want To?

HyperKulture: Making Space for Your Inner Homebody – A Case for the Great Indoors

HyperKulture: You May Ask Yourself, ‘How Did I Get Here?’ – The Pitfalls of Passion Drift

HyperKulture: Yes Means Yes Means What? – Miley, Rihanna and Me

Images: Chris Gilmore (top), SamahR (middle) and Eiti Kimura. 

The post Beyond the Algorithms – Don’t Look Now, But You Are What You Click: HyperKulture appeared first on EcoSalon.

Willy Loman, Meadow Lark Lemon, Ricardo Moltobon, have you heard of them? These so called fashion fans never had either, yet they lied about it in the name of cool. Why? 

How far are you willing to go to look cool? Come on, admit it—we’ve all told a little white lie in the name of self-elevation. You know, when we are wrapped up in conversation with someone we aren’t exactly familiar with, or maybe a little intimidated by, we nod our heads agreeing like lemmings that ‘oh yes, we know that person’—or place, or seen that foreign film.

Okay, so we’ve all been there in one form or another, right? But I know you’ve never taken it this far.

During New York Fashion Week, Jimmy Kimmel’s team brought their “Lie Witness News” to the steps of Lincoln Center to see if fashion week attendees would take the bait.  The film crew blended into the chaos of runway show attendees and asked questions about made-up designers like Joe Azoozoo, George Costanza and Eddy Munster’s line and so-called model trends like the Uni Boot. The individuals thought they were being interviewed by verified press, one of the many that flood the parade circling around fashion week, and plenty of the self-proclaimed fashion fans and even industry professionals nodded and confirmed the non-existent fashion designers and trend.

Watch the video above: It makes me wince and fill with empathy each time another interviewee agrees with a lie.

What’s going on here?

The industry has created a monster feeding off exploited rapid trends–just like the music industry is banking off on Miley Cyrus’s naked body. It’s hurting Miley, it’s hurting the designers, and it’s hurting the community who are in a confused circus of peacocks.

The mainstream fashion industry today isn’t about the craft of making a garment or the brilliant construction of the clothing or the viewing of a true dedicated artist’s work–it’s about blind consumption and dollar signs. The sharpest, most dedicated designers I know don’t do runway shows. They don’t fling clothes at bloggers or hire PR agencies to promote their lines. They put their heads down and follow their gut instinct. They are artists in love with the creation process and with complete conviction make a living off their craft. They don’t follow they lead. And certainly, they don’t entertain customers like the ones in the video.

“The fact that I couldn’t even see the dog poop shows that she’s a good model. Because until you pointed it out, I was like ‘Oh, she looks great. What’s wrong with this?’ And then you’re like, the dog poop, on the head.”

See Also:

Between The Lines: From NYFW to the Garment Factories of Pakistan

Where Will Fast Fashion Leader H&M Strike Next? Africa Is Likely

The post Jimmy Kimmel Punked NYFW: Are We All Marketing Lemmings? appeared first on EcoSalon.

Just for the taste of it?

Today Diet Coke celebrates its 30th birthday. Since that fateful day when it  was introduced on August 9, 1982, ad campaigns have been targeting sexy, savvy women that just want to keep their waistlines small. In our mid-80s and early 90s stupor (most likely shoulder-pad induced), we were seduced by the likes of Paula Abdul and Whitney Houston selling us a chic and slim product that was made to make us look and feel good. Or at least so the advertising led us to believe.

Lest you think that our newfound love of farmers markets, quinoa salads and artisan cheese would have us move away from mass marketed, artificially sweetened and carbonated drinks, thanks to advertising, branding and marketing, Diet Coke has seated itself as the second most popular soda in the world, with 927 million cases sold in 2010. In Europe you can buy lingerie-inspired Diet Coke bottles designed by Jean Paul Gaultier himself, and apparently it’s so delicious that one consumer in England was drinking seven pints a day for 10 years.

Diet Coke makes you feel sexy. An empowered woman. And hey men, if you drink it, the ladies will be drooling all over you!

We have been seduced by advertising, forgetting to ask ourselves what downing a diet soda a day really does to our bodies.

Diet Coke’s addicts will probably tell you that the research on aspartame is inconclusive (despite the fact that it has over 90 known side effects). As Zoe Williams put it in an article on the history of Diet Coke in the Guardian:

Artificial sweeteners are a very controversial subject. Some governmental health authorities may say they are safe enough, but in the nutrition industry, that’s still up for debate. Some studies indicate that the man-made molecular structure of some artificial sweeteners could be linked to certain health problems. This requires much more research. Research however, has indicated other adverse issues from consumption of artificial sweeteners, including encouraging sugar cravings; and increasing appetite.

No matter how many cheesy ads we watch, deep down we know we shouldn’t be drinking the stuff. Just like you know fully well that you shouldn’t down an entire chocolate cake, or eat barbecued ribs for every meal. “All good things in moderation!” some might say, but is Diet Coke a good thing? Sure, we have yet to prove causation between drink consumption and obesity, but do you see scientists having to come to conclusions on the health effects of water? The fact that we have to test soda to begin with should be true cause for concern.

We should know better. We can forgive our predecessors for sucking down Tab and later turning to Diet Coke when it rebranded, but the fact that we’re still guzzling sodas of any kind in 2012 is simply unacceptable. Single use plastic bottles (because it doesn’t always come in cans), artificial sweeteners, global greenwashing… pick your poison; the entire soda industry is one that’s made up of not only promoting a product whose nutritional elements we don’t need – trust me, Diet Coke is not the place to get your daily dose of, well, anything – but also using resources that could be put to better use elsewhere.

Want to really celebrate Diet Coke’s 30th birthday? Try drinking a nice, sexy glass of water instead.

Image: Amy McTigue, Tim’s Blog

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In the last of this 4 part series, undercover industry writer, Louise Lagosi address the history of fashion marketing, the strategies used to build the perfect consumer while covering up poor quality, and how those tactics have effected us as a society. We also look at how the fashion industry and marketing is changing with the times to keep up with an evolving society of people.

If you read the first three parts of this series, you might be in the mood to avoid the media, shut off your TV, stop shopping, and just give up on fashion. But, other than offering you peace of mind, what would that accomplish? As easy as it is to point fingers, the leaders of the fashion industry are not the only ones responsible for the state of fashion. Society as a whole bought what was being sold without stopping as individuals to question the motives behind the advertisement or wondering if our “consumer” habits were good for us, our neighbors, or the planet.

Unless you want to go back to wearing burlap bags, and go Medieval, we all need something to adorn our bodies. And let’s face it, beautiful clothes, beautiful anything for that matter, really does make life more joyful. That said, nothing can be beautiful if it has a dirty, rotten underbelly it’s hiding. So let’s just get to the core of this thing.

Taking Responsibility

Now that the phrase “Think Globally, Act Locally” has been imprinted on our brains, we all know that shopping with small mom and pops stores, as well as supporting local designers and supply chains is the best thing we can do for our immediate environment, but how can we be effective on a global level? Have you read any articles, or signed any petitions requesting that corporations clean up their acts? Written to your government representative asking for higher international labor standards lately? Not sure who your representatives are? Well, it’s pretty easy to find out. In this age of information sharing with a little due diligence and research it’s becoming increasingly easier to figure out who’s doing business right, and who’s doing business wrong. And it’s even easier to find a petition or even to start a petition asking companies and the government to do business responsibly.

It has become more and more common to share our opinions and knowledge of this kind freely among our friends and associates, on Facebook, Twitter, and various social media sources. As a favor for your sharing the information, they in turn go on and share it with their friends and pretty soon the news has gone viral. Some of your conversations on Facebook might look something like this:

“There’s a joke going around China today that you can tell what colors are going to be in fashion next season by looking at the rivers.“

“I think I’ll opt for a nice neutral, beige from now on, thanks.”

 “Time to Stop the Fashion Pirates again. Forever 21 has gotten caught stealing yet another design from independent designers.”

“I stopped shopping at Forever 21 after my last purchase from there smelled like magic markers and fell apart in the first wash. But I do buy clothes from the local designers in my own town.“

 “Why does Disney still carry polyester jammies for kids coated in fire-retardants? Didn’t they get the memo that it’s been repeatedly proven that both the synthetic fibers in clothing and formaldehyde based fire-retardants are carcinogenic, cancer causing, hormone disrupting, and/or can cause damage to our nervous systems?!

“I wouldn’t know, I avoid both synthetics and Disney like the plague.“

 “Did you hear that Victoria’s Secret were caught slashing and throwing away garments that were returned because donating them to charity was too much of a hassle to organize?”

“I wouldn’t wear Victoria Secret, even if it were free. Let’s just say that I don’t know a single 16 year old whose boobs naturally sit directly under her chin, so why, at any age, should mine?”

Whether or not these conversations in social media and on the street actually sway the decisions of those in power to create a change in the industry, for us to be aware enough about these issues that we feel a little whistle blowing is in order can make us better, more informed, people.

Word gets around fast in this Internet Age and in no time at all, Walmart has a publicity crisis for abusing their laborers, and the Gap is making public apologies for promoting red,white, & blue flag waving products that are made in China. H&M and Nike claim they too are doing their parts, all while receiving raised eyebrows from the sustainable community, for making lofty corporate responsibility initiatives mandated for 2020 that promise unprecedented standards with little or no suggestions on how they might go about doing so. Perhaps H&M & Nike could borrow from their multibillion dollar marketing budgets to fund reaching their 2020 goals.

Are initiatives enough? Hardly, but when you’re a company that’s big enough to consume one third of the planets organic cotton supply, even a small initiative, like H&M’s organic cotton initiative can keep large amounts of fertilizer and herbicide from going into our water, provided it’s an honest effort. “Good” is questionable when you take into account that their organic cotton is not all that organic after all.

Recent New York City H&M window

With their greenwashing marketing efforts these companies still do not get the green light for sustainable shopping. In the same way we shop for food, if we can’t find clear and certifiable labeling on the product, many of us are not buying it. Some consumers are even going so far as avoiding stores with bad track records altogether, regardless of their “eco” initiatives.

In 2009, The Hartman Group’s report, titled Sustainablity: the Rise in Consumer Responsibility stated that 88% of consumers engage in what they consider to be sustainable behavior. Are people hearing concerns about water contamination or global warming and choosing to cut back where they can to help? Are fast fashion fans growing annoyed that their clothes fall apart after a couple washes when the hand-me-downs from their mother’s wardrobe seem to last forever? Have people suddenly realized that they have enough stuff in their closets that they could probably go for years without shopping and still maintain appearances?

Author of Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion, Elizabeth Cline, describes the pivotal moment in her consumer mindset, “When I piled up all of my clothes in the middle of my bedroom, I was astonished that there wasn’t much variety within the mound of poorly made clothing. It was mostly all one color, and I had bought more or less the same few items over and over again. I wasn’t using most of it, and most of it was cheep crap that I didn’t even like very much. Overall, I was unsatisfied with what was in there.”

She explains the transformation that occurred in that moment of realization, “It made me more mindful. I shop my own closet now. I have stopped buying repeat garments. I don’t crave having a million tops. That doesn’t really interest me anymore. I want one or two good garments for each category to make complete outfits within my wardrobe. I want to save my money to buy really nice items to fill in the holes.”

Signs of Change in Mainstream Fashion Media

CFDA Leader, Diane Von Furstenburg, and American Vogue Editor-in-Chief, Anna Wintour, recently released that they support encouraging a cleaner Fashion Industry through an initiative presented by the NRDC called Clean By Design. We’re still waiting to see how they do clean up, but they have taken the first step, which is openly acknowledging the elephant in the room. This is nothing short of a miracle.

Fashion Labels Evolving With the Times

Eileen Fisher

This privately owned company has always taken a holistic approach to designing clothing. The brand carefully chooses fibers for their sustainable, community based, growing methods, natural content, longevity, and feel. They work with collectives and factories around the world that pay fair-trade wages. They design clothes that are timeless and that do not relate to any trends, allowing the clothes to survive as long as their high quality materials do. And through their recent initiatives like Ampersand, they have been educating their customers on why choosing their products supports a sustainable environment here on earth for everyone involved.

Patagonia 

Patagonia also keeps their marketing to a minimum, but when they do promote something, the message is unusual for a clothing company. They promote clean water initiatives, such as Our Common Waters, in their recent Common Threads Initiative, they tell people to stop buying more than they need. They also provide transparency in their supply chain like in The Footprint Chronicles, with this interactive map on their site showing exactly where their factories are located with stats, reports, and a brief on Patagonia’s history with each one. This brand ultimately puts their dollars in recycled materials innovations, such as polar fleece made of recycled bottles, and maintaining factory standards, so they can provide more responsible products to their customers.

Timberland

Timberland is a brand that is committed to the outdoors. Which is why they have made  developed TIMBERLAND RESPONSIBILITY, their plan for significantly reducing their companies emissions through the research, evaluation, and investment in company structures that will allow them to run cleaner and produce products that have a smaller impact on the earth. The company reports are transparent and available to the public on their home site, grading their efforts and describing all the methods used to achieve their challenging goals to reduce their company wide climate impact.

Levi’s 

Levi’s has been doing business with the goal of striving towards sustainability and excellence for over 100 years now. They give cash credits to customers who return their old Levi’s in for their denim recycling programs and they have been working on increasingly finding ways to reducing their water use in their denim production processes. Are they singing about their exceptional practices in their ad campaigns to help better educate their customers? Let’s just say this is one of the places where they still have room to improve.

Pendleton

This nearly 150 year old American company produces much of it’s premium products, from fibers grown, spun, dyed, and woven in America. They keep marketing to a minimum and keep their funding aimed at doing business responsibly and offering the best quality products possible to the customers they serve. Their product’s are so beautifully made, by  that they end up heirlooms in most of the fortunate homes that they grace.

Change is indeed happening all around, but most of all it starts with each one of us. We have to make up our own minds. What type of consumers are we?

Image: oxfam, Fashionista, Last Night’s Garbage,Amy DuFault

The post Fashion Marketing 101: From Social Media to Social Responsibility, Fashion Evolves appeared first on EcoSalon.

Don’t believe the hype.

These days, big brands are falling over themselves to prove they are toeing the planet-friendly line and sticking to wholesome products – and that’s good for everyone (when it’s not a lie, of course). Over the last 4 years we’ve been keen to champion the companies choosing the natural and sustainable over the artificial & toxic. Here are 6 posts from our archives where we ask – is it natural?

I purposely put all of the prominent, still-independent brands in this list because I want to tell their stories. But this isn’t a story about small vs. big, small being good and big being bad.

All the independents listed below are big companies, but they have the ability to uphold higher standards and work within their missions because they aren’t beholden to the intense scrutiny of the money managers.

Just for fun, can you guess which ones they are?

The Stories (And Money) Behind 10 Of Your Favorite Organic And Natural Brands

We use conditioners to keep our hair healthy, sleek and shiny. Or just to avoid looking like the Scarecrow from Oz.  Whether you’re a daily conditionista or someone who simply smooths it on once or twice a week, you’re going to want to keep it organic.

Why? To avoid the common ingredient in conventional conditioners called Lauramide DEA. It strips away important amino acids like serine, histamine and other hair and skin proteins. This can leave hair feeling dry and unmanageable – creating the need to use more conditioner. Who knew hair conditioner could be so conspiracy-theory! While the debate continues to rage about how conditioners will eventually destroy us all, we’ve got you covered with products that won’t.

6 Best Organic Hair Conditioners

Greenpeace recently reported that clothing items bearing the logos of 14 global brands – including Adidas, H&M, Calvin Klein and Abercrombie & Fitch – have been found to contain nonylphenol ethoxylates (NPEs), chemicals that can break down to form the hormone-disrupting substance nonylphenol (NP). Just this morning, Reuters released the news that Nearly 300 Cambodian workers fell sick this week at a garment factory producing goods for Swedish fashion brand H&M.

14 Fashion Brands Test Positive For Hormone Disrupting Chemicals

A Perfume Organic offers four scents, each for $65: Green, Urban Organic, Perfumed Wine-Rose and White Magik. Green is rose with hint of chamomile; Urban Organic is lemon with ginger and grapefruit; White Magik has white flowers with spearmint; and Perfumed Wine-Rose is berry, crisp apple and peppers. I have to be honest – with my history of fragrance headaches, I approached these perfumes as one might approach a root canal. You know you gotta do it, but you just want it to be over with. Commence crushing headache, right?

Cue the ringing of church bells and throwing of confetti! Nary a headache did I have with these scents. They smelled fresh and botanical. If you want to smell like fruit, you smell like fruit. If you want a hint of floral, it’s there. My favorite was White Magik for its sage and spearmint “aftersmell.”

A Fragrance Without The Fragrance: Organic Perfume Review

There are a lot of eyeliners on the market, with pencil, liquid and cake eyeliners being the most popular. The only true skill you need is a steady hand, and what I mean by that is the steadiness it takes to make your eyes look superbly lined and cat-like, without appearing like something The Joker may have applied!

The trick to lining your eyes is to start small. Do little dashes along your lid and then blend with a brush to avoid that weird eyeliner strip of flesh – you know, when there is a space of flesh between your eyeliner and your actual eye. Start from the middle and do small strokes, front to back. Short strokes, small dots even, can help you look more Catwoman than Scary Makeup Clown.

Five Of The Best Natural And Organic Eyeliners

Take a stroll through the cereal aisle and you’ll see box after box of sugary confections that look more like desserts than breakfast. Of course, all of those glazed mini cinna-buns and marshmallows are clearly not healthy, but what about the whole grain oats, shredded wheat and flax flakes? General Mills’ Oatmeal Crisp Crunchy Almond is “whole grain guaranteed,” but the ingredients include brown sugar, sugar, high-fructose corn syrup and honey, making it 27% sugar. Kellogg’s Raisin Bran may be mostly wheat flakes, but it still has just as much sugar as Lucky Charms at 19 grams. In contrast, Kashi 7 Grain Whole Puffs has zero grams of sugar, and Cheerios have just 1. Check out this chart at Harvard School of Public Health to compare dozens of varieties.

10 Health Foods With More Sugar Than A Coke

Images: stublog, kaibara, kaibara87 and

The post From The Vault: The Whole(some) Truth appeared first on EcoSalon.

We’re celebrating what?

Leslie and Steven Ticktin are gearing up for their annual Cinco de Mayo fiesta in San Francisco, ordering the taco truck and buying the beer and tequila to entertain their social circle – parents clad in peasant shirts  and sombreros and munching on cheesy nachos as they celebrate the holiday. What’s the history? Why are we doing this?

Californians are crazy for Cinco de Mayo but what’s ironic is the day is more of a big deal in the various Mexican restaurants in the border town of El Centro, California than in neighboring Mexicali, Mexico.

El Centro is where Bay Area architect, Steven Nielsen, will be celebrating. Stationed in the town near San Diego and Palm Springs while renovating its main hospital, he was invited to join the Ticktins’ annual party, but declined, saying “Why would I come to San Francisco on Cinco de Mayo when I live right near Mexico?”

Authentic Mexican at Rosa’s Plane Food

While Nielsen might only get as far as the local favorite Rosa’s Plane Food in Calexico at the border crossing, stop by a picnic hosted by the regional medical center at a park, or take in the 150th annual Cinco concert at a local theater, it might feel more like the real McCoy because of the influence of the large Mexican-American population inhabiting the quirky border town. Better at least to be near Mexico than in San Francisco when celebrating the food and culture.

While El Centro boasts some of the best Mexican restaurants and markets on the West Coast, it also scores #1 in U.S.  unemployment. Despite its rich agriculture and potential for growth, the nondescript town of about 42,000 is mostly distinguished by box stores and homes with foreclosure signs. The best jobs are working with the border patrol and keeping your own people from crossing over illegally and into a better life. In other words, the challenges facing the population are not quite reflected in the day of recognition. Add to that the scorching climate which has earned the border town the name “Hellcentro.”

Cinco parade in Puebla, Mexico

Perhaps an opportunity to celebrate and recognize the Latino culture in the U.S., Cinco de Mayo is hardly marked in Mexico except for the state of Puebla and for good reason. This is because it is not Mexico’s Independence Day, as some falsely believe, but rather the commemoration of the 1862 Battle of Puebla, where General Ignacio Zaragoza Seguin and his army of mostly Mexican Indian soldiers defeated the invading French forces of Napoleon III. It was heralded as an important movement in the American Civil War – the French prevented from disrupting the Union by setting up shop in Mexico. This might be one reason Cinco de Mayo has been embraced by Americans.

It was popularized as a Hallmark holiday by Mexican Americans in the 1970s as a way to focus on civil rights issues in Texas and California. That’s when it migrated from the southwest to other U.S. regions, becoming an annual festival of color and spirit. As writer Robert Lovato pointed out, the whole Cinco push as a start to summer happened in the late 70s and 80s by white people feeling unsafe in predominately Latino neighborhoods like San Francisco’s Mission District and Old Town, San Diego.

Some of the feedback on the web points out the hypocrisy of celebrating Mexican culture in other border areas like Phoenix, Arizona where wars are being waged over the immigration laws. “Perfect day to wear the classic Kiss Me (but don’t deport me) I’m Mexican t-shirt,” writes one resident of Tijuana, Mexico. “I wonder if the bars in Arizona make any pesos or dollars out of this wonderful marketing scheme.”

As CNN tells us this week, you can find plenty of Mexico in the U.S. since much of the Southwest was once part of our neighbor to the South. We’re told to consider “a more authentic Mexican experience than simply ordering a margarita and chips at the local sports bar.” Make a trek to the Alamo; Check out the first Spanish settlement on the West Coast at San Diego State Historic Park; Travel to Colorado’s Fort Pueblo, incorporated as territory in 1870, home to the Chile & Frijoles Festival each September.

According to Rosa Maria Barahas, who opened her Plane Food restaurant some 23 years ago alongside a runway strip at the Calexico International Airport, it is mostly Americans who dine at her authentic restaurant on Cinco de Mayo.

“They are excited about the decorations, the beer and the special plates I make with customs from Mexico,” she says.

For border town celebrants like Nielsen, it’s just nice to be closer to the culture while honoring the day, something he might not be able to experience at a purely white bread affair in San Francisco with a taco truck parked outside.

Image: Maverick2003

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Marketers get keen as to what drives women to shop based on habits.

Good and bad, everyone has habits. Flossing, exercising, online shopping, putting two teaspoons of sugar in your tea – the things we do on a daily basis end up shaping a large part of who we are, whether we realize it or not.

Habits used to be something we could keep to ourselves. If we liked to buy a pint of Ben & Jerry’s every Thursday night, we were free to do that. Nobody else needed to know about it, save perhaps for the quasi-judgmental person at the cashier.

But increasingly, our personal habits – more specifically, data about what we buy and when we’re most likely to buy it – are sought after by retailers, marketers, and statisticians. And there is one group whose personal purchasing data is most desirable: working women aged 24 to 54.

A recent New York Times Magazine article highlighted the tactics that retail giant Target uses to tailor it’s marketing strategy to individual customers. The author, Charles Duhigg, provided the example of a fictitious shopper who, based on a complex set of algorithms created by Target’s mathematicians, had an 87 percent chance of being pregnant and due in August:

“Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug… Target knows [that if Jenny] receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she’ll use it when she comes back again.”

Duhigg goes on to explain how Target amasses information on individual customers by assigning each one a guest ID number. If you’ve ever used a coupon, visited a website, paid with a credit card, filled out an online survey, or opened an email from Target or a company like it, it’s likely you have a guest ID number as well. It’s also likely that Target is already sending you tailored ads and coupons for things they know will get you in the store, like a pint of Ben & Jerry’s.

As one columnist recently put it, “data is the currency of the internet.” The relationship between gaining access to our personal data and a company’s ability to boost profits is explicit and direct. A recent study found that increased government regulations on online privacy would result in reduced investment in and less innovation coming out of places like Silicon Valley, the nation’s tech-entrepreneurship capital.

So is it a bad thing if marketing firms and brands can anticipate our wants? If a runner does an online search for running shoes, wouldn’t a discount coupon for said shoes be beneficial to them?

Holly Buchanan is a marketing consultant and author who specializes in web-based marketing geared towards women. Buchanan says that when it comes to personalized marketing, a consumer’s reaction depends largely on the context in which they received the ad.

“For women who want a more relevant shopping experience, if your Amazon account suggests books you might like based on your past purchases, that’s helping to make your shopping experience better,” said Buchanan. “But what people get turned off by is the creepy factor. If you’re in Gmail and you get served up an ad based on content in a personal email. That’s creepy because you’re not in a shopping environment; you’re in a personal environment.”

The methods used by marketing firms to figure out what women want have progressed far beyond traditional focus groups. In addition to the habit-based research collected by large retailers like Target, Buchanan says other online marketing tactics include searching Twitter hashtags on a certain topic, reading personal product reviews on websites like Yelp, using targeted ads on Facebook, and interpreting website analytics to ascertain who is viewing what.

Google’s often criticized new privacy policy takes everything one step further by integrating the personal data collected across all Google products (think YouTube, Google+, Gmail, Google Maps, and Chrome) into one pool. Marketers can then use this information to customize ads across a wider platform.

There’s a reason, of course, why profit-seeking companies and eager marketers want women’s data specifically. Long known to marketers as CPOs or “chief purchasing officers,” women make 80 percent of the buying decisions in American homes.

“Women control so much [purchasing] power because so often they’re the ones doing the initial research,” Buchanan says. “As advertisers you have to get on her radar screen first in order to get his radar screen.”

An underlying maxim in marketing, according to Buchanan, is to go by what people actually do, rather than what they say they do. That is why data about female’s actual shopping habits, rather than data collected by asking women about their shopping habits, is so sought after.

“Any research you can do that measures consumer behavior versus what consumers say they do is incredibly valuable,” Buchanan says. “For women, there’s a lot of judgment in society (for mothers in particular), so they will tell you ideally what they’re going to do, but that isn’t necessarily what they’ll do.”

Image: tiseb

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Editor’s Note: This four-part series from a leading industry insider is authored under the pseudonym “Louise Lagosi” for the individual’s protection. The series addresses our engagement with consumer culture and how marketing and advertising can manipulate us – and society as a whole.

Whether or not you are aware of it, this image of celebrity Jennifer Aniston is embedded with psychological material. Her honey-blond hair and softly-lit, Photoshopped face is childlike and dewy. Her intense attention to the money in her hand while clutching her designer bag loaded with more cash oozes power, sex, wealth, and control. The photograph even uses markers to pinpoint these little features while at the same time promoting the items you might want to buy if you wish to look like this. Celebrity, eternal youth, power, wealth, sex: That’s what this carefully articulated image has to offer up for sale.

But at face value, what is it really giving you?

Now, look at these photographs. What do you see? Realize that any previously presented Anistonian aspirations are absolute nonsense. She’s an attractive woman to be sure, but she’s only human. Even Jennifer Aniston doesn’t live the life that Jennifer Aniston leads in the above glossy magazine image.

Presenting Jennifer looking average or even shabby is playing up the competitive side of our human natures, getting us to compare ourselves to her, picking her apart, and at the same time picking ourselves apart through the comparison. We’re being primed to react defensively to the first image: Go shopping. But, at the end of the day, what does Jennifer Aniston have to do with our personal lives, and why do we find ourselves looking at her and other celebrity personalities with the obsession that we do?

Stuck In An Advertising Ambush

Are we truly tired of the messages that ads and the media are sending us? If you’re falling out of love with your relationship to fashion and shopping in general, join the club. It’s still a small one, but it is rapidly growing as our living spaces and surroundings are cluttered with stuff while our credit cards are maxed out. We need very little and yet we seem to want so much. And everywhere we look we see both evasive and aggressive marketing campaigns which bombard us with advertisements on a daily basis, suggesting that we need to buy more to gain beauty, glamor and fabulosity. In fact, if fashion were a drug, it would be almost impossible to kick the habit; there are pushers on every corner.

President of the Marketing Firm Yankelovich, Jay Walker-Smith, stated in a CBS news article, “It’s a non-stop blitz of advertising messages. Everywhere we turn we’re saturated with advertising messages trying to get our attention. It seems like the goal of most marketers and advertisers nowadays is to cover every blank space with some kind of brand logo or a promotion or an advertisement.”

Research from the late 1950s to the 1970s has shown that the average person 40 to 50 years ago was exposed to somewhere between 78-500 ads a day. Walker Smith points out that today we’re exposed to as many as 5,000.

NYC The Blog reports on the first NYC subway train completely wrapped in advertising

The tipping point is coming. Do-not-call. Adblock. “We have to screen it out because we simply can’t absorb that much information. We can’t process that much data,” Walker-Smith notes, “and no surprise, consumers are reacting negatively to the kind of marketing blitz; the kind of super saturation of advertising that they’re exposed to on a daily basis.”

There’s even an advertising company, cleverly called Wizmark, that’s putting advertisements in urinals. “You can’t look left. You can’t look right. You have to look at the ad and listen to it,” Richard Deutch, CEO of Wizmark brags with tongue firmly set in cheek.

Buying Into Luxury Brand Ads

Over the last 20 years, the fashion industry has employed numerous marketing tactics to drive consumers into a shopping frenzy, making industry giants enormously rich. Investing in “brand strengthening,” companies cultivate consumer loyalty which equates to high numbers in sales, quite often, from returning customers who have bought into the message that the brand’s advertisements are selling.

Take, for example, one of the most competitive luxury brands in the world: Louis Vuitton. In 2010, Louis Vuitton spent some $14 million on advertising during the first quarter. Their ad campaign appeared all over the pages of luxury lifestyle magazines, news publications, and across the internet where affluent shoppers would see them while shopping. Surprisingly, it was not enough to stimulate their consumer demand because in 2011, during the same quarter, they increased their budget to $22 million ( a 57% budget increase). The steep increase in ad spend could hardly be considered a coincidence.

The above ads were just about everywhere you looked in New York City during the spring of 2011. Louis Vuitton employed a small army of campaign advertisements to seduce luxury consumers back after the Great Recession.

In 2010, Consumer Reports revealed a noticeable trend that consumers were changing their habits: Shopping less, saving more, and choosing products that they equate with craftsmanship, practicality, and social values (think TOMS shoes) rather than luxury status “bling”. Bling is out. The reports also revealed that this new trend was not likely to go away anytime soon; it wasn’t merely a reaction to economic pressure, this new consumer was an entirely different beast living by a new set of rules. All of those advertisements were the velvet-gloved iron fist of Louis Vuitton attempting to coax the mass of luxury and aspirational consumers back into their former position of brand submission.

If you took eight LV samples and stuck them in a trash compactor, out would pop this expensive little piece of “limited edition” baggage called the LV Tribute Patchwork Bag. This particular bag might have cost approximately $3000 to make, but was sold exclusively to only 20 customers (worldwide) for $42,000 a pop in select stores.

What’s $36 million in advertising? Chump change to a company like Louis Vuitton that wants to ensure a dominant market position doesn’t erode. (In 2011, LVMH, the company that owns LV, boasted in their company quarterly report net profits of over $2 billion in fashion and leather goods sales alone.)

If you’re selling logo-covered, luxury-status, vinyl-canvas handbags with the words “Louis Vuitton” stamped on them, you can charge consumers a premium. The price tag we see can be anywhere between 250-1400% of the expense of making even a very well-made bag. The more expensive price tags (in the $1000+ range) subsidize the basic vinyl tote bags Louis Vuitton offers in the hundreds, allowing the company to lure the aspirational middle class with “affordable” luxury.

To the luxury fashion consumer, the primary value is not in the the design, the materials, or even the quality of labor that goes into the bag – it’s in the social status that the advertisements and exclusive products offer to customers. And over the past 20 years, while there have been many consumers that have bought right into the dream, there are those conscious customers who have simply walked away. After all, who really needs another logo-plastered tote when there are already so many of them out there?

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