"Smart Choice" Program is a Joke

You may have seen a commercial on TV recently for some Kellogg's cereal including Fruit Loops and Cocoa Krispies...indicating that these cereals were "Smart Choices" for feeding your kids for breakfast. I guess the likes of John Stossels would say, "Give me a break". Labeling on these cereals indicate that they contain up to 41% sugar content per serving - the number one ingredient on the label...followed by corn flour - a high GI food. Talk about setting your kids up to become another member of the obese metabolic syndrome crowd. Pharmaceutical companies are probably wetting themselves watching these commercials in glee.

Here is a look at the head of the program and some "thought" behind the program

Eileen T. Kennedy, president of the Smart Choices board and the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University, said the program’s criteria were based on government dietary guidelines and widely accepted nutritional standards.

She said the program was also influenced by research into consumer behavior. That research showed that, while shoppers wanted more information, they did not want to hear negative messages or feel their choices were being dictated to them.

“The checkmark means the food item is a ‘better for you’ product, as opposed to having an x on it saying ‘Don’t eat this,’ ” Dr. Kennedy said. “Consumers are smart enough to deduce that if it doesn’t have the checkmark, by implication it’s not a ‘better for you’ product. They want to have a choice. They don’t want to be told ‘You must do this.’ ”

Dr. Kennedy, who is not paid for her work on the program, defended the products endorsed by the program, including sweet cereals. She said Froot Loops was better than other things parents could choose for their children.

“You’re rushing around, you’re trying to think about healthy eating for your kids and you have a choice between a doughnut and a cereal,” Dr. Kennedy said, evoking a hypothetical parent in the supermarket. “So Froot Loops is a better choice.”

Wow...so it ranks as better than a donut...so let it have the appearance of being good for you? That is some sound logic? Huh?

I was watching a show on UCTV recently (University of California), a show they put on called Mini Medical School for the Public, a great show for the crowd that cares about things like their own health and well-being in a world run by idiots. Anyway, this particular show had a nutritional componenet to it, as many of them do. The lecturer showed a series of charts on some research done on kids blood glucose levels...and how they were affected by what they ate for breakfast. Kids that ate a high sugar breakfast, like Fruit Loops, had a significant spike intheir serum glucose levels as compared to kids that ate "other" foods lower in sugar. The elevated glucose continued for a few hours...but out at around 5 hours, or lunchtime, their glucose dropped to slightly below baseline, or becoming slightly hypoglycemic.

So, the kids were then offered free choice lunches. The kids that ate the sugary breakfast cereal, and became slightly hypoglycemic, ate 81% more calories at lunch than the other group....EIGHTY ONE PERCENT!! But Fruit Loops are a "Smart Choice"!!! Good Grief.

Maybe you guys on this Smart Choices Board need to get a second opinion...and get the conflicts of interest off of the board as well.

Oh, and just for your info, Smart Choices Board, since you obviously don't follow the news...in the last week or two here are a couple of things you might have missed:

A spoonful of sugar? Americans are swallowing 22 teaspoons of sugar each day, and it's time to cut way back, the American Heart Association says. link

and from the same article

Sandon said that parents can help lower that sugar intake by getting soda out of the house, looking at how much sugar is in their kids' cereal and substituting snacks like cookies with popcorn.

and Obama and friends are considering a sugary drink tax. So, why not tax sugary cereals as well?