Well, no surprise there. According to an industry-backed labeling scheme, sugary cereals are "healthy."
A new food-labeling campaign called Smart Choices, backed by most of the nation's largest food manufacturers, is "designed to help shoppers easily identify smarter food and beverage choices."
The green checkmark label that is starting to show up on store shelves will appear on hundreds of packages, including - to the surprise of many nutritionists - sugar-laden cereals like Cocoa Krispies and Froot Loops.
"These are horrible choices," said Walter C. Willett, chairman of the nutrition department of the Harvard School of Public Health.
He said the criteria used by the Smart Choices Program were seriously flawed, allowing less healthy products, like sweet cereals and heavily salted packaged meals, to win its seal of approval. "It's a blatant failure of this system and it makes it, I'm afraid, not credible," Mr. Willett said.
Companies who pay up to $100,000 per year to participate in this program include Kellogg's, Kraft Foods, ConAgra Foods, Unilever, General Mills, PepsiCo and Tyson Foods. The language used by the asshat junk food apologists in the NYT article quoted here is identical to similar, previous scams run by the food industry, where they tell you how to identify "better for you" choices among junky processed foods (as opposed to "fun for you" choices). I love the part in Michele Simon's book Appetite for Profit where she talks about the "better for you" labels, asking: Better than what? Starvation? Seriously.
Well, to be more specific, the aforementioned junk food apologist said in the article that the Froot Looops cereal with a Smart Choices checkmark on the box would be a better choice than doughnuts. That may be true. But somebody who is shopping for cereal is not comparing cereal to doughnuts. They are comparing it to other cereal. And it's not terribly difficult to locate a cereal that is "better for you" than Froot Loops. What about oatmeal for breakfast? Rolled outs are a fast-cooking, easy, minimally processed breakfast option that can be very tasty with raisins and a bit of brown sugar or maple syrup. Now THAT is a smart choice.
What I'm perhaps most disgusted about is the participation of Eileen T. Kennedy in this project. She's the president of the Smart Choices board... and the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. I'm friendly with a number of Friedman School students, faculty, and graduates, and quite frankly, this is not something I would have expected from them. Big Food will always be Big Food, but they don't need to have academics and health experts lending credibility to their bullshit in this way. |
