Playing Whac-a-Mole with industrial “healthy food” marketing
FOOD | Julianne Glatz
I started laughing when I spied the bottles of grapefruit juice at the store. “What’s funny?” another shopper asked.
“It says ‘Fat Free,’” I chuckled. “Why does that make you laugh?” she asked. “Because grapefruit juice is naturally fat-free,” I replied. “They’re trying to make us think it’s something special when it’s just regular grapefruit juice.” An exploding number of food and drink products’ “front-of-package” labels make claims that range from lowering cholesterol, being heart healthy, regulating colons, improving concentration and memory and even “defying death.”
They’re called functional foods – a term most people have never heard and, even if they have, probably don’t know what it means. But it’s very familiar to industrial food processors. As Natasha Singer says in a recent New York Times article, “Functional food has turned into a big business for Big Food.”
So what is “functional food”? There’s no specific, legal answer, at least not here in the United States. Amorphous variations are available on the Internet. Wikipedia succinctly stated: “Functional food is any healthy food claimed to have a health-promoting or disease-preventing property beyond the basic function of supplying nutrients. The general category of functional foods includes processed food or foods fortified with healthpromoting additives.”
It’s hardly a new concept. The idea of food as medicine dates back to ancient Greece. In the early 20th century, Iodine was added to salt, and Vitamin D to milk to improve health. The first commercial cereals were created in health sanitariums in the late 1880s to improve patient health. Coca-Cola was originally sold as a nerve tonic – and included cocaine.
Today’s functional foods do include healthy nutrients. But how much? Are they really better than similar products? And, most important, are their “healthy” claims valid, or merely hype?
A few years ago, commercials for Kellogg’s Frosted Mini-Wheats implied that kids who ate Frosted Mini-Wheats for breakfast did better in school. “Oh, please,” I thought when I first saw them.
In one, a teacher mumbles as she fumbles with some papers, “Now where were we?” “We were on the third paragraph of page 57 and you were explaining that the stone structures made by ancient Romans were called aqueducts,” a student chirps. “And you were writing that up on the board, and your chalk broke – in three places.”
“I’ve never been so proud,” says a cartoon Frosted Mini-Wheat, brushing away tears.
“They can’t think anyone actually believes this?” I thought. But a voiceover had proof: “A clinical study showed kids who had a filling breakfast of Frosted Mini-Wheats cereal improved their attentiveness by nearly 20 percent.”
Economists call products like these “credence goods.” Because it’s impossible for almost everyone to evaluate such products’ claims, people depend on experts.
And on regulators. I was dubious about Frosted Mini-Wheats’ claims, and so were the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission. Their investigation of Kellogg’s “clinical study” revealed that the children who ate a FMW breakfast were compared to kids who were only given water. Even then, only about half the FMW group showed
