For our final reflection on Melinda Beck’s Wall Street Journal article on health food “fine print,” we’ll consider a few more products whose marketing claims are a bit of a stretch.
“Super Water”
Have we reached a point in human evolution when regular ole water isn’t healthy enough anymore? Some restaurants now have water menus. Leaving the issue of tap vs. filtered vs. bottled for another day, think about the volume of H20 sitting on shelves and in coolers at the local grocery store. I’m not talking about gallons here. I mean the vast variety of name-brand water, marketed as everything from energy enhancers to stress reducers. This one is supposedly jam-packed with antioxidants; that one will help you drop those extra pounds. Are these fashionable drinks as mighty as they claim?
The Center for Science in the Public Interest doesn’t think so. They deemed the marketing of VitaminWater offensive enough to sue manufacturer Coca-Cola Co. back in January, arguing that the drinks are primarily sugar water. The vitamins added to various brands of flavored waters are unlikely to deliver strong health benefits to anyone who isn’t vitamin-deficient; and the sugar, aspartame, and other deleterious ingredients may prove to provoke more harm than any of the drink’s supposed health advantages.
Omega 3s and Other Add-ins
“Fortified” seems to be the word of the day. But an isolated ingredient added to a highly processed food is generally not as beneficial as the natural form of that ingredient found as part of the complex nutritional biochemistry of a whole food. Beck gives us a good example:
You’d need to drink 45 eight-ounce glasses of milk that is fortified with 32 mgs of omega 3 to get as much of these fatty acids as you get in a three-ounce serving of salmon.
Yogurt has cultivated a “healthy” reputation by being fortified with potassium, probiotics, and more. Those cute little yogurt tubs boast big benefits: lowering cholesterol, protecting digestive health, controlling blood pressure. Some may have the support of scientific studies, but how do we know which to trust if marketing regulation is so obscure?
Cheerios: Heart Healing “Drug”?
The big news most recently concerning food marketing regulation is the May 5 warning letter sent by the FDA to General Mills, the makers of Cheerios. Apparently, the FDA’s review of the labeling of Cheerios Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal found “serious violations” concerning Cheerios boxes’ claim that eating the cereal is “clinically proven to lower cholesterol,” as well as unacceptable use of the claim that regular whole grain consumption can reduce the risk of certain cancers. According to the FDA, Cheerios boxes are promoting not a food, but a drug.
Sparks are flying from all sides as reporters, bloggers, and every-morning-Cheerios-eaters debate whether General Mills has the right to make its current marketing claims. After all, as currently stated on the Cheerios home page:
Cheerios’ soluble heart health claim has been FDA-approved for 12 years, and Cheerios’ ‘lower your cholesterol 4% in 6 weeks’ message has been featured on the box for more than two years.
“The science is not in question,” this response goes on to say. The FDA merely takes issue with the wording and presentation of the Cheerios boxes and website. A quote from the warning letter rebuking Cheerios’ incomplete claims regarding cancer and heart disease risk reduction states that the failure to include required information of the health effects of fruits, vegetables, and fiber content “does not enable the public to understand the significance of the claim in the context of the total daily diet.”
How to decide which side to take in such a dispute? Well, as in most cases, there’s something to be learned from all sides. While I’d venture a guess that most consumers consider their breakfast cereal “food” not “drug” (which perhaps means that the FDA could be using its scarce resources on something more useful than picking on Cheerios), I’m also grateful for enforcement of regulation that seeks to protect and inform the consumer regardless of his or her knowledge or ignorance of basic nutrition information. Nutrition is a complicated field to navigate, even for its own experts. If disallowing sketchy food marketing claims – or even nitpicking incomplete ones – contributes to consumer knowledge and wellbeing, I’m all for it.
Thanks again to Melinda Beck for her informative and thought-provoking article. Hope you’ve enjoyed our blog series, and as always, we’d love to hear your thoughts on food marketing, confusing labels and ingredients, or anything else you’d like to share. Join the conversation by adding your comments below.
Read the first two posts in this series by clicking the following links:
Richard J. Arsenault, 2011
