Battling the bulge: Margo Wootan leads the fight to prevent childhood obesity.

Negrea, Sherrie

While running errands one Saturday two years ago, Margo Wootan '86 suddenly found herself craving a Snickers bar. She hadn't been thinking of chocolate when she'd left home, but there she was in line at the drug store, the supermarket, and the office supply store, surrounded by sweets.

The realization that the checkout aisle had become a prime marketing tool for junk food led Wootan, director of nutrition policy at the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), to design a campaign to replace candy with healthier options. With an $800,000 grant from the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Wootan co-wrote a 70-page report on the food industry's "sneaky strategy for selling more" at checkout, which called on retailers and manufacturers to change their practices. "It's just not ethical for stores to be pushing extra calories on people at a time when obesity is one of the most pressing health problems facing the country," she says.

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Wootan's fight against junk food is her latest effort to transform the nutritional landscape. In her 23-year-career at CSPI, Wootan has spearheaded campaigns to create national policies requiring trans fat labeling on packaged food products, menu labeling in chain restaurants, and updated nutrition standards in schools.

"Margo is one of the best and strongest advocates that we have for nutrition and public health, particularly for policy efforts to help prevent childhood obesity," says Tracy Fox, president of Food, Nutrition & Policy Consultants. "She has a good political sense and an ability to communicate effectively, and that's what it takes to move the needle in the right direction."

Wootan, who grew up in a family of 11 children in Kingston, N.Y., says her interest in health stems from her father, a physician. After earning an associate's degree at Ulster County Community College, she transferred to Cornell, where one of the first classes she took was Introduction to Nutrition.

"It just confirmed to me that this was the right area of study," says Wootan, who later became a teaching assistant in the course.

With a doctorate in nutrition from Harvard's School of Public Health, Wootan landed a job at CSPI, the country's leading nutrition advocacy organization, in 1993. When studies began showing that trans fat was causing heart disease and high cholesterol, Wootan launched an effort to ask the Food and Drug Administration to require companies to include trans fat on nutrition labels. It would take 13 years before the regulations went into effect.

"It's not just a matter of writing a petition," says Bonnie Liebman, MS '77, director of nutrition at CSPI. "You have to keep the pressure on. Eventually the FDA finalized the regulation, which led to at least a 50 percent reduction of trans fat in the food supply."

Another key battle was Wootan's effort to require calorie labeling on menus in restaurants with 20 or more outlets. To convince the industry that federal legislation was needed, Wootan worked to pass a dozen state and local laws requiring calorie labeling. Since chains didn't want to meet different sets of regulations, the National Restaurant Association agreed to back a federal law on menu labeling, which is set to go into effect this December.

"A lot of studies link eating out with obesity," says Wootan, who expects the law to help curb rising obesity rates. "The portions are so huge, and people eat less healthfully than when they're home."