After 44 years as president of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, Michael Jacobson is stepping down. During his long tenure, Jacobson not only helped develop nutrition labels, he “has also had a hand in halting the marketing of many sugar-filled foods to children, reducing salt levels in packaged foods, and banning transfats,” says NPR.
After starting his career as an academic scientist, Jacobson founded CSPI with two co-workers in 1973. While the organization spent its early days hawking posters with nutritional facts, it now occupies sleek offices in Washington, D.C., and employs a team of lawyers to take on the food industry. If he could do it all over again, Jacobson says, “I would have hired more lawyers, earlier. Lawyers know the rules of the game. Scientists don’t.”
Jacobson admits that change often comes at glacial speed. Nutritional labels, for example, “haven’t generated as much change as we hoped,” he says, adding that “one of the saddest things is fruits and vegetables. Despite all the free publicity that fruits and vegetables get, requirements in school food programs, farmers’ markets everywhere, fruit and vegetable consumption has not increased in 20 years.”
Jacobson, who will stay on half-time as a senior scientist at CSPI, will be replaced as president by veteran consumer advocate and public health official Dr. Peter Lurie.