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Marion Nestle On How Google Does Food

The Google campus in California
The Google campus in California

You have to read her whole post to get the full effect: the campus planted with organic vegetables that anyone can pick and eat; the myriad tricks to point employees toward the healthy food instead of the junk; the company bicycles to encourage activity. Even vending machines that price their snacks based on the amount of sugar, fat, saturated fat and transfat they contain. She concludes:

On this basis, Quaker Chewy Bars are 15 cents each, Famous Amos cookies are 55 cents, and an enormous Ghirardelli chocolate bar is $4.25. Weights don’t count and neither do calories. The machine is not run by Google. Whoever does it has a sense of humor.

Not every company can feed its nearly 30,000 employees like this but every company can adopt some of these strategies. It might save them some health care costs, if nothing else.

This program aired on July 13, 2011. The audio for this program is not available.

Headshot of Carey Goldberg

Carey Goldberg Editor, CommonHealth
Carey Goldberg is the editor of WBUR's CommonHealth section.

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