Search results: Cereal

The USDA has just issued a corporate challenge to food companies to “step up to help end childhood obesity by empowering the household gatekeeper to assist her in modeling a healthy lifestyle and by providing information to help her make healthy food choices for herself and her family.” How? Uh oh. By using MyPyramid. This may indeed be a challenge. Even nutritionists have trouble understanding how to use MyPyramid. USDA provides a long list of suggestions of ways food companies might use MyPyramid.  These make me think we will have to wait and see whether such things as CDs in cereal boxes, placemats, and websites are able to use the Pyramid for real education rather than for marketing the companies’ products.

Kellogg’s is doing its bit for America’s health by adding whole grain to guess which cereal: Frosted Flakes! Kellogg’s sets its own nutritional standards–Kellogg Global Nutrient Criteria. This cereal meets them. Why do this? The whole grains provide enhanced nutrition for kids along with energy. Of course Frosted Flakes provide energy. They contain sugars!

Dr. Yoni Freedhoff, who directs a bariatric medical clinic in Ottawa, sends a video report (in which he stars!) of an investigation into the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation’s Health Check program on food labels. This program is much like our American Heart Association’s (AHA) Heart Check program. For both programs, companies pay the organizations for use of the Check on the package label. Both use saturated fat and sodium as cut points for use of the logo, but don’t care much about sugars. I’ve argued for years that putting the AHA’s Check on sugary cereals misleads consumers and is not a good idea. The video–and the press accounts–of this investigation ought to hugely embarrass the organizations, maybe even enough to get them to end the programs.

According to a group that tracks this sort of thing, the leading generators of food sales are (more or less in order): soft drinks, refrigerated milk, ready-to-eat cereal, fresh bread, bottled water, cookies, chocolate candy, and potato chips. Soft drinks are #1. A sufficient explanation for America’s weight problem?

Thanks to Yoni Freedhoff, a physician in Canada, for sending his blog notice about an alliance between the Canadian Heart and Stroke Foundation and Disney to market food products. Take a look at the foods the Foundation is endorsing. This reminds me of similar alliances between the American Heart Association and sugary cereals. The American Diabetes Association used too have a deal like that with Post Cereals, but stopped doing that after Jane Brody wrote about it in the New York Times (I discuss these alliances in What to Eat).

The World Cancer Research Fund and the American Institute for Cancer Research has just come out with an update on their 1997 report on diet and cancer risk and prevention. After five years of research, the groups have produced ten recommendations. These, no surprise, look not all that different from most other sets of dietary recommendations issued for the last 50 years or so for prevention of chronic disease risk.  The recommendations emphasize staying lean and being active (“eat less, move more”). The report will be loaded with data, charts, and references and I’m looking forward to getting my copy. Enjoy!

• Be as lean as possible within the normal range of body weight.
• Be physically active as part of everyday life.
• Limit consumption of energy-dense foods. Avoid sugary drinks.
• Eat mostly foods of plant origin.
• Limit intake of red meat and avoid processed meat.
• Limit alcoholic drinks.
• Limit consumption of salt. Avoid mouldy cereals (grains) or pulses (legumes).
• Aim to meet nutritional needs through diet alone.
• Mothers to breastfeed; children to be breastfed.
• Cancer survivors: Follow the recommendations for cancer prevention.

I am back from India and still trying to make sense of the experience. India, of course, is a mass of contradictions, one of which is its state of technological development. My hotel room, for example, had an excellent Wi-Fi signal but it was not possible to access it. It was secured and had to be paid for but the hotel had not figured out how to collect the money. Result: no Internet access (they said they were working on it).

Here are just a few snapshots of what I saw of the food-and-health scene in India:

• From the International Herald Tribune, September 27: “Food is going to be like oil, a product that gets more expensive as China and India get richer…There is a growing population that is improving its standard of living and wants to eat more.”
• From the New Delhi Express, September 30: the percentage of extremely poor people in India (those earning up to 7 rupees—17 cents!–per day) fell from 26.1% in 2000 to 21.8% in 2005, but the proportion of the population that earns less than $2 per day rose to 77%–meaning 836 million people. This means that India’s new prosperity is doing some good for the rest of the population, which means 350 million people.
• If you want food in small villages on the road from Delhi to Jaipur, or anywhere else in rural areas around Delhi, the easiest option is to buy it at small stands, of which there are many, everywhere. All of them sell 3-ounce bags of Frito-Lay chips for 20 rupees (50 cents). Frito-Lay is owned by PepsiCo; its ability to distribute products to the remotest areas is truly astounding. Pringles are also ubiquitous in this part of India, but they are very expensive–65 or 70 rupees a tube, an amount close to the average daily income of 2/3 of India’s vast population.
• From a medical doctor who works in a mobile clinic: “We expected to be treating infections but instead we are overwhelmed with type 2 diabetes and hypertension.”
• Newspapers reported that the municipal water authority in Hyderabad has been selling water to Coca-Cola at one quarter of the price it charges community residents.
• Regulation of genetically modified foods is under dispute; the environment ministry is refusing to deal with the health and safety concerns even though his ministry is supposed to. Cornell University scientists are conducting tests in India of GM eggplants.
• New Delhi is a sprawling city of small, low buildings and hundreds of thousands of tiny shops–but for how much longer? Its finance minister says India must open its $330 billion retail market to foreign investors, but doing so “will require convincing mom-and-pop stores across the country that the entry of big players would not affect their jobs.” This may be a hard sell. Wal-Mart is first in line. As the Wall Street Journal put it last month, “International expansion is critical for Wal-Mart…A typical store will stand between 50,000 and 100,000 square feet and sell a wide range of fruits and vegetables.” In Delhi, fruits and vegetables are sold from street stands. There are no large supermarkets in this city of 14 million people. Small (very small by our standards) supermarkets are just coming in. They mostly sell packaged foods. Most people in Delhi buy fruits and vegetables at street stands or mini farmers’ markets, of which there are many.
• Small grocery stores in Delhi sell Kellogg Chocos (the equivalent of Cocoa Puffs) cereal with a cartoon of a young Krishna on the package. When I bought it, the clerk handed me a free Krishna game CD. The back of the box says: “Being a mother is difficult, more so in the mornings.” The solution? Chocos! As it explains, “1 serving of Kellogg’s Chocos = Fibre of 2 chapattis + Calcium of 2 glasses of milk.” On the side panel: Chocos “provides adequate energy and nutrients for the body and brain, helps improve school performance, helps keep weight under control, and helps you feel full.” Marketing to children has arrived! I showed photographs of this box in the lecture I gave on Gandhi’s birthday.
• McDonald’s restaurants are all over Delhi. They serve hamburgers (20 rupees) but in this largely vegetarian country mostly sell things like Chicken Maharajah Macs, Wrap Paneer Salsas, and Shahi Paneer McCurry Pans (55 to 65 rupees).
• I thought I knew Indian food. Wrong. I did a sampling one night at Dilli Haat, a state-run market that has food stalls (and gorgeous handicrafts) from the major regions of India. The cuisines are different, each more glorious than the next.

Flying around the Internet is a press release from Kellogg announcing its new method for promoting the nutritional benefits of its products. Like PepsiCo’s Smart Spot and Kraft’s Sensible Solutions, Kellogg products will now have icons–based on the company’s own nutritional criteria, of course–indicating which products are “better for you.” Even better, you can participate in the launch of the new program. Register online for a panel discussion explaining how it all works. When Congress forced the FDA to permit health claims on food packages in 1990, it opened a Pandora’s box. I think we’d all be better off if companies weren’t allowed to do this. Surely, all the different methods of self-evaluation must be confusing, no?