The new standards dictate that by 2016, Wal-Mart will reduce the sodium content and sugar content as well as completely eradicate transfat in food sold in its stores. All the while, Wal-Mart promises to keep the food cheap. Wal-Mart’s executive vice president of corporate affairs, Leslie Dach, told the New York Times, “We’ve always said that we don’t think the Wal-Mart shopper should have to choose between a product that is healthier for them and what they can afford.”

This isn’t the first time Wal-Mart has made an investment in good food. Last October, the company pledged to invest $1 billion in buying produce grown on small, local farms and to train 1 million farmers in sustainable agriculture. In a story on Salon, Michelle Loayza hinted at an inevitable suspicion toward Wal-Mart’s real intentions:

Great! But wait … a billion dollars, a million farms: That comes out to $1,000 per farm. And so we started to wonder if there was really much good to be had from this policy.

We wondered if folks would be equally suspicious about Wal-Mart’s latest would-be social enterprise project. So we turned to Food Safety News reporter Helena Bottemiller who covered the story on Twitter. Here’s an edited version of her (great) feed in chronological order:

Tweets from @hbottemiller:

Thu 20 Jan 09:25
@WalmartCAN & FLOTUS joining forces today to announce major #food initiative: 25% reduc. sodium, 10% reduc sugars & no trans fats by 2015

Thu 20 Jan 09:30
“Wal-Mart is in a position almost like the [#FDA]. I think it really pushes the #food industry in the right direct.” -Jacobson/CSPI

Thu 20 Jan 09:47
To put the scale of new initiative into perspective: 140 million customers visit @Walmart stores every week.

Thu 20 Jan 10:22
If #localfood is often cheaper because you don’t have to ship it then why does @Walmart not have more of it? #simpleeconomics

Comment from grist.org’s Tom Philpott:
Thu 20 Jan 10:24
@tomphilpott: @hbottemiller Not always sufficient infrastructure to deliver local produce at the vast scale demanded by #walmart.

Thu 20 Jan 10:28 (reply)
@tomphilpott right, that’s my point. Small-scale farms wont ever have the scale @Walmart demands… so there’s an overhead in sourcing.]

And this afternoon, Helena tweeted out her full write-up:

Fri 21 Jan 12:20
Walmart Unveils Healthy Food Initiative http://bit.ly/fvHzgV #nutrition #health #freemarket

Tom’s piece on grist is also worth a read as is this Melanie Warner criticism on bnet with the strongly worded title, “Why the Walmart-Michelle Obama Plan for Healthy Eating is Doomed.”

Well, what do you think? Is Wal-Mart’s new strategy a sincere effort to help Americans eat healthy? Or just another scheme by a profit-hungry company? Let us know in the comments.

Almost without fail, question No. 1 is: Are there actually vitamins in this? A close second: How many calories does it have? Which is basically the same question as: How much sugar does it have? Or: Is it supposed to be good for you? Nutritious?

Yesterday, the British Advertising Standards Authority banned a Vitaminwater ad for falsely advertising the answers to that last big question. The ad described Vitaminwater as “delicious and nutritious.” The watchdog group reprimanded Vitaminwater’s new-ish parent company, Coca-Cola Co., for calling a product containing as much sugar as a soft drink “nutritious.” As long as the ad disappeared, the company would face no further action.

It’s worth pointing out that Vitaminwater was an independent company the entire time I worked there. While many of the marketing strategies changed after the acquisition, the post-Coke Vitaminwater seems to be in the cross hairs more often. This latest shakeup is just another bullet point on a long list of infractions. Last year, food and nutrition writer John Robbins — who is quite ironically the heir to the Baskin-Robbins ice cream super fortune — published an incendiary blog post called “The Dark Side of Vitaminwater” that condemned the Coca-Cola Co. for how it handled one such lawsuit brought on by a nonprofit organization. And frankly, he kind of had a point, because Coke’s lawyer’s defense against claims that Vitaminwater falsely advertised being a nutritious beverage almost sounds like a joke: “no consumer could reasonably be misled into thinking Vitaminwater was a healthy beverage.”

Well, I can’t speak for Vitaminwater. I worked there a few years ago, probably signed a non-disclosure agreement, and frankly, don’t have a bad thing to say about the scrappy, independent flavored-water company I worked for. Coca-Cola is a different beast, and statements like the above baffle me. The verbiage used provides some insight, though.

The events I set up to introduce the “complimentary” product to “consumers” tended to involve an “active lifestyle” and usually ended up being a lot of fun. When I talked to “consumers,” I’d act “familiar” and sometimes even “snarky.” If they asked about the vitamin content, I’d point to the nutrition label. When they asked about the calorie count or sugar content — and almost everyone did — I’d explain how it was a “good sugar,” called “crystalline fructose,” which is “the same sugar you find in an apple or orange.” If they really pried and asked me if it actually worked, I’d parrot the company slogan at the time: “It works.”

If Vitaminwater drinkers were misled, well, that was kind of the point. It’s called “guerrilla marketing,” a term best explained as using nontraditional tactics to developing a relationship between a brand and a consumer, sometimes subversively. (Think Che Guevara with a Harvard Business School degree.)

I put myself through college saying all the right things and helping to build a company I loved. I left just after my boss’s boss’s boss sat us down in a room and announced that Coke had bought Vitaminwater’s parent company, Glacéau, for $4.1 billion, the biggest deal in beverage industry history. Some of my co-workers who’d been smart enough to secure equity — unlike me — bought houses overnight. I moved to Brooklyn, N.Y., and became a writer.

Do I drink Vitaminwater? Sure, sometimes. The fact of the matter is that it’s delicious. It’s also full of sugar but the pharmaceutical-like label somehow eases me into forgetting about the empty calories my body will soon be absorbing.

Do I think that the false advertising claims are valid? Probably, some of them. But, frankly, Vitaminwater contains less sugar than super nutritious things like orange juice. It’s still sugar water, though, despite  how “good” the sugar might be.

Do I believe in the brand? Absolutely not. One thing Vitaminwater did nail, though, is the X-Files effect. People want to believe that Vitaminwater is healthy. The Harvard Business School-trained brand manager and architect of the company’s strategy deserves some credit for (subversively) manufacturing false hope.

Call it false advertising, too, if you want.

Why the sudden — and incredibly public — effort to slim down? As Fisher said at her press conference Wednesday, “I Googled myself recently without a lubricant and I came across a posting that someone made about me which was, ‘What ever happened to Carrie Fisher? She used to be so hot, now she looks like Elton John.’ Yeah, that hurt.” Chalk up another victory for the haters on the Internet.

It’s been a long time since the “Star Wars” glory days, to be sure. Generations of sci-fi geeks still credit the sight of her in a gold bikini as a defining moment in America’s collective puberty. Now, at 180 pounds, the 5-foot-1 actress is inarguably overweight. Or, as she puts, it, “I’m fat. All the clothes in my closet belong to another chick. They have to make a new alphabet for my bra size.” That Fisher, who says she’s already shed 12 pounds on the diet and exercise plan, would want to take positive steps for her health and self-esteem is laudable. And with obesity rates and associated health problems of Type 2 diabetes and heart disease skyrocketing, for a woman who’s both an icon and a funny, down-to-earth real gal to be open about her own path to better health is surely encouraging for others looking to make changes in their own lives. For Fisher to lend her considerable humor and writing talent to Jenny Craig (which has in the past made use of another self-deprecating wit — if not stellar dieter — Kirstie Alley) certainly makes the process far more real to most potential dieters than Holly Madison complaining that she was told to lose weight for a Las Vegas burlesque revue.

But none of us are the people we were even a few years ago. We can do a bang-up job of staying healthy and we may be the lucky ones with youthful genes, but things are still going to loosen and sag and spread out. Fisher knows that, joking, “I swear when I was shooting those films I never realized I was signing an invisible contract to stay looking the exact same way for the rest of my existence.”

But it seems just plain awful that part of anyone’s motivation to make a lifestyle change would be the opinions of trolls on the Internet, the kind who gleefully suggest a woman has now morphed into Jabba the Hut. Why the sense of contrition, the walk of shame? This week, while Fisher was admitting that “I’m pretty fearless, but my scale is frightening,” Seth Rogen was complaining of his training for “The Green Hornet” and boasting, “Now that the movie’s over I hope to get fat again. Because I enjoy it.”  Try to get your brain around imagining a high-profile woman saying that. Ever.

For the ever candid Fisher to be so frank as she embarks on what she calls a new way of interacting with food could be the start of something healthy and good — even if Jenny Craig’s plan isn’t, for many people, exactly a slam dunk success. But when she writes that “people are seeing me as this fat woman … not as someone who’s written books or who did this show and got through all these crazy obstacles I’ve gotten thru,” it seems the problem isn’t Carrie Fisher’s. Because if you look at a woman and can’t see her grace and wit and strength because you’re too busy snarking on her weight, maybe it’s not her body that needs fixing. It’s your mind.

First, he’ll have to get over the resistance to this counter-intuitive notion and the anger of the six or seven still-employed magazine food editors in America. I mean, isn’t the whole point of food porn to make you drool in your lap and want to tear into a pot pie? Yes, Tierney explains, but there’s a difference between the psychological phenomena of “sensitization,” which is when picturing that hot, steamy pot pie makes you want it, and “habituation,” which is when you get over that desire, satisfying it. What Carey Morewedge (I find it impossible to not say his full name) found was that people can bypass their desire and trigger habituation to food. But to do so, you can’t just imagine having it in front of you; that leads to sensitization. You have to really, concertedly imagine yourself in the process of eating it. A bunch of it.

In his experiments, subjects were shown photos of 30 M&M’s, one at a time, for three seconds each. Others were shown photos of 30 cubes of Kraft cheddar, one at a time, for five seconds. Afterward, the M&Mers still liked M&Ms, but ate fewer than they would normally. The cheesers still like cheese, but also ate relatively less. (Though maybe Carey Morewedge was stacking the decks. He couldn’t find a more appealing cheese than Kraft cheddar?)

Cheese choice aside, the psychologists concluded that the phenomenon was, in fact, habituation. The pictures didn’t actually turn people off of those foods, they just didn’t feel like eating much of them; their desire had been tempered. And, notably, the subjects didn’t feel “full,” nor were they less likely to pig out on foods they hadn’t been staring at, further suggesting that the phenomenon was related specifically to the stimulation of the particular food the subjects were picturing themselves eating.

Knowing that, Tierney suggests a way for us to bypass unhealthful foods:

For instance, if you had a bag of carrots and a bag of potato chips in your home, you might try mentally consuming the chips so that you’d be more inclined to reach for a real carrot. And then, assuming that worked, perhaps you could try habituating to other vices … If you imagined watching “Jersey Shore,” could you avoid the real show?

Reading that, though, I came to my first objection, and it’s not in defending my hair-gelled home state. Everyone knows chips are irresistible, and everyone knows that they’re extra-super irresistible when you don’t really realize you’re eating them. That is, when the Doritos are a backdrop to watching the Chargers demolish the Chiefs on Sunday afternoon, and you suddenly realize that you’ve just eaten the entire bag. Food psychologist Brian Wansink argues that most of our overeating results not from hunger or even deliciousness, but simply because we tend to eat mindlessly — our mouths just keep going until the bag or plate is empty, as he famously demonstrated with a secretly self-refilling bowl of soup.

So if you are mindful enough to sit there and concentrate on eating chips … one … by … one, you could probably skip the self-fake-out psychological somersaults and just monkishly eat exactly five Doritos and no more. And, you know, actually experience the pleasure of those chips.

And that thought led me to realize what made me kind of uncomfortable about this whole business in the first place. There’s a lot to be said for the pleasures of the imagination; the brain is wider than the sky. But the central notion here is to imagine the stimulation of eating something you crave and thus, essentially, becoming bored with it before you take an actual bite. If it can be codified into an effective technique, more power to the people who use it well. But I can’t get past the idea that what you’re actually doing is curbing your desire without any of the pleasure of satisfaction.

Despite the fact that my doctor actually called me the other day to say that my cholesterol made him sad, I detest our culture of dieting. For every grapefruit miracle in the world there are 50 million stressed-out, disappointed yo-yo dieters, and I can’t help thinking that’s because our fundamental diet framework is about denying ourselves, trying to live virtuously without pleasure. What if we turned it around and decided to really indulge in our pleasure? To not gorge ourselves whenever we want something, but to eat smartly, in physical moderation, but to also really give our brains over to the senses and the experience of eating? You wouldn’t need a ton of food if you chewed slowly, considering and truly savoring each bite. You might even find yourself habituating … the real way.

Besides Obama, the bill also was a priority for his wife, Michelle, who launched a national campaign this year against childhood obesity.

“We can agree that in the wealthiest nation on earth all children should have the basic nutrition they need to learn and grow,” Mrs. Obama said. “Nothing is more important than the health and well-being of our children. Nothing.”

The $4.5 billion measure would expand free school meals for the needy and give the government power to decide what kinds of foods may be sold in schools.

The legislation also increases the federal reimbursement for free school lunches by 6 cents a meal at a time when many school officials say they can’t afford to provide the meals. The new money also will allow 20 million additional after-school meals to be served annually in all 50 states. Most states now only provide money for after-school snacks.

Obama used the occasion to laud lawmakers of both parties for passing the bill, saying it shows they can unite on issues that affect the future of the nation’s children.