I had been planning to blog about groups that I make end-of-year donations to when a handy list came along that closely overlaps with mine. Ironically, it’s from an industry front group called the Washington Legal Foundation. These corporate shills recently started a silly website called Eating Away Our Freedoms. (They even trademarked the name, that’s how clever they think it is.) The best part (in addition to the creative re-do of the federal MyPlate image above) is the page called, “Who’s Eating Away Our Freedoms?” – a list of my favorite colleagues (such as Marion Nestle and Mark Bittman) and non-profit organizations, complete with links to their websites. Two groups I have close working relationships with and whom I especially recommend you donate to are: Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood and Corporate Accountability International. I also highly recommend Food Democracy Now and MapLight.

It seems some thought I was a tad too harsh in my critique of the new MyPlate, the federal government’s latest attempt to teach Americans how to eat right. So in the spirit of recognizing positive moves coming from Washington D.C., here is some good news.

Last week, First Lady Michelle Obama announced the latest addition to her effort to reduce childhood obesity: Let’s Move Child Care, which includes a checklist for child day care providers to follow. The most impressive recommendation is to limit screen time. Specifically, to “none under age 2″ and for 2 and up, limit to 30 minutes / week during child care and no more than 1-2 hours / day of quality screen time at home.

This is a very strong recommendation (backed by the American Academy of Pediatrics) and cannot have made the television industry or its advertisers very happy. And it could help reduce the negative impact of marketing because the earlier children form emotional bonds with cartoon characters, the sooner junk food pushers can exploit those connections. Remember that scene in the film Super Size Me when Morgan Spurlock showed how easily young toddlers recognized images of icons such as Ronald McDonald?

Kudos to the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) for its leadership on this issue. (Full disclosure, I am on their steering committee.) In recent years, CCFC has been fighting Disney over its controversial videos, Baby Einstein. The upshot of that battle was Disney changed its advertising claims.

We have certainly come a long way. Here’s what Let’s Move has to say on videos for babies:

Not too long ago, moms and child care providers all over the country were buying and showing videos and DVDs galore geared entirely toward the infant audience. But now we know that babies and even toddlers (ages 0 to 2 years old) shouldn’t get any screen time at all — zero, not even a few minutes here and there.

Take that Disney! (Here is CCFC’s statement applauding the first lady’s campaign.)

Other positive recommendations for day care centers include serving fruits or vegetables at every meal, avoiding fried foods, saying “so long to sugary drinks” and my favorite: just give kids water, imagine!

When it comes to keeping kids hydrated, it doesn’t get much better than plain old water. And it’s wise to serve toddlers and preschoolers only water at meals — so that they don’t get filled up with milk or juice, making it less likely they’ll have room to eat.

Did you hear that American Beverage Association and National Dairy Council?

Why is this a big deal? In addition to providing leadership and supporting parents, the Let’s Move campaign says it has already received commitments from the Department of Defense, General Services Administration, and the nation’s second largest childcare provider, Bright Horizons, to implement the checklist, which will impact the lives of more than 280,000 children.

And that, is a very good start.

You can watch the first lady’s video announcement here.

In this week’s Health Blog, the Wall Street Journal’s Katherine Hobson asks readers to chime in on a “debate” among family doctors over the ethics of corporate sponsorship of medicine.

But first, the backdrop. Last year, the American Academy of Family Physicians announced “a new corporate partnership program” and its first partner was to be The Coca-Cola Company. Soon thereafter, about 20 doctors resigned from the organization in protest, drawing attention to the matter by Food Politics author Marion Nestle as well as advocacy groups such as the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood. (Full disclosure: I serve on CCFC’s steering committee.)

The grant amount was described as being in the “strong six figures” by AAFP. Here is how the group described the partnership in its October 2009 press release:

The Consumer Alliance is a program that allows corporate partners like The Coca-Cola Company to work with the AAFP to educate consumers about the role their products can play in a healthy, active lifestyle. As part of this partnership, The Coca-Cola Company is providing a grant to the AAFP to develop consumer education content on beverages and sweeteners for FamilyDoctor.org, an award-winning consumer health and wellness resource.

Consumer education? That must explain how a search for “Coca-Cola” on FamilyDoctor.org, brings up helpful content on hydration like how “even caffeinated drinks, such as coffee, tea and soda, count toward your daily water intake,” and why sports drinks are useful for athletes, and how safe the artificial sweeteners aspartame and saccharine are. All of this brought to you by Coca-Cola under the guise of consumer education. Even the disclaimers on each of these pages is misleading:

This content was developed with general underwriting support from The Coca-Cola Company.

That makes it sound as if the Coca-Cola is just paying someone else to do the writing. But it appears the company is directing the substance of the content as well, since the verbiage is pretty similar to that found on Coca-Cola’s own website on these very topics. (See for example, the company’s page on sweetener “facts and myths.)

It’s bad enough for a medical trade organization (and “award-winning” website) to be bought off by American’s number one promoter of unhealthy beverages, especially to children, but now apparently, almost a year later, the issue has turned into fertile ground for navel gazing as a way of justifying the move after the fact.

This week, AAFP’s journal, the Annals of Family Medicine, has published two perspectives on the matter. One penned by Dr. Howard Brody, AAFP member and director of the Institute for the Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch. He’s not in favor of the idea:

The physician has a duty to prescribe medications or make dietary recommendations based on scientific evidence. The companies have an interest in selling more beverages, or more drugs, regardless of the evidence.

Precisely. In contrast, AAFP president, Dr. Lori Heim, sees no need to assume conflict of interest:

To gauge an individual or organization’s ethics, one must view its behavior over time, define the goal of that behavior and compare the outcome with the mission and values. Within this context, one can determine whether the assumption or appearance of conflict of interest or ethical lapse was, in fact, correct.

What? She lost me somewhere between outcome and values.

Taking money from Coca-Cola is not a science experiment that you watch over time, gather data, and then publish the analyzed results. But if one were to approach the issue that way, there’s no shortage of evidence of Coca-Cola’s “ethical lapses.” Whether your concern is marketing to children, labor abuses, or contaminating water supplies in developing nations, Coca-Cola would be the one company you’d not choose as a partner. Journalist Michael Blanding has written an entire book called The Coke Machine: The Dirty Truth Behind the World’s Favorite Soft Drink, due out in September, which chronicles these misdeeds and more.

But why, almost a year later, is the AAFP journal publishing what amounts to an academic debate between two doctors over an issue that has obviously already been decided? I realize that wheels of academic publishing turn very slowly and that perhaps these articles were submitted months ago, but why was there no public debate before AAFP took the money?

All this does now is give credence to idea that taking corporate money is a worthy subject of debate in the annals of medical journals, right up there with questions like, what sort of treatment a doctor should give patient X or Y. What about those 20 member doctors who resigned in protest last year? Where are their opinions published in any medical journal? This no debate at all. It’s simply an effort to whitewash the situation so now AAFP can say: See, we grappled with the issue in our journal under the heading “Ethical Issues.” Oh and by the way, we’re keeping Coke’s cash.

As I blogged about in March, Coca-Cola isn’t the only soda company seeking to infiltrate the medical establishment. The Yale School of Medicine has partnered with PepsiCo to allow the soft drink and snack food giant to fund a research lab and fellowship. Where does this end? At what point will we no longer have truly science-driven research institutions and unfettered medical professionals available to help Americans sort through the confusing clutter of health and nutrition information? Or has that time already come? Let’s hope not.

You can send a letter to AAFP asking them to end the Coke deal here, on the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood’s website.