MARION NESTLE: "FOODS ARE NOT DRUGS"

I couldn't agree more. Read her blog post titled "Health claims for yogurt? Really?" which ends: "Probiotics are another reason why the FDA needs to set better standards for health claims. If it were up to me, food packages would have no claims on them: none at all. Foods are not drugs."

She then gives another wonderful example of why we should not trust the big food companies:

I mean, come on: cocoa krispies boosts immunity?

Kellogg's is making the claim based on the fact that the cereal is both "fortified" and "enriched" ("enriched" means adding back nutrients that were lost during food processing; "fortified" means adding nutrients to food that weren't originally present) with vitamins made from petroleum.

(Digression: "Petroleum?!" you say. Yes, as outlined in the fascinating book "Twinkie, Deconstructed" several of the vitamins used to enrich flour, such as Niacin (Vitamin B3) are made from petroleum. And, as you'll see from this graph:

Niacin is naturally present in whole wheat flour, and is then stripped out and added back in, in a quantity less than what was there originally. Cocoa krispies are made from rice, not flour, but white rice has the same vitamin problems as white flour when you compare it to natural brown rice. Brown rice, in fact, has a good deal of thiamin (B1) before being processed into white rice. B1 was the first vitamin to be discovered, and its discovery directly resulted from the invention of white rice, and the fact that when white rice first started gaining popularity a new disease emerged, beriberi, which people at first took to be a bacterium or other contagious disease, but was later discovered to be a deficiency of Vitamin B1. Now of course, we just add it back in through the "enrichment" process. And yes, if you're wondering, B1 is also made from petroleum. )


Anyway, here's a larger version of the cocoa krispies box:


And another good example: