Health

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Who Knew Cookies Could be Nutritious?

Last week a commercial for a new product Whonu? cookies began airing nationally. It basically contends that its cookies are a healthy choice for consumers.

On their website, but a little less so in the commercial, the company makes an array of nutrition claims comparing itself not only to oatmeal and milk, but also to the vitamins in blueberries, spinach, carrot juice, tomato juice, cottage cheese, and fruit:


*MOUSE PRINT: Those little asterisks lead to a fine print disclosure on the website, and a similar one in the TV commercial, which is visible for only three seconds:

So, you have to eat three cookies to get the nutrition they claim. However, when looking at the nutrition label for their Oreo-like cookies, one discovers that it contains only three grams of fiber, not four, as one would find in a serving of Quaker Old Fashioned Oats. And all the other vitamins and minerals are mostly in the 10% range (with a few up to 30%) of one’s daily requirement.

The bigger problem in our view is not quibbling over the claims referring to one cookie or three cookies, or the amount of fiber. Rather, it would be an unfortunate result to have people think they could eat these cookies as a substitute for all the healthy foods they compared them to, which obviously, as a whole, provide much more nutrition than these vitamin-spiked snacks.

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Where’s the Juice?

At a recent consumer meeting where breakfast was served, the only orange juice offered were bottles of an orange/mango combination from Nantucket Nectars.

MrConsumer noticed a number of other attendees and consumer advocates grabbing this drink, which was also labeled “all natural”. Upon closer inspection, the label contained several inconspicuous surprises:

*MOUSE PRINT:

The words “juice cocktail” are in tiny, tiny print on the front lower left of the bottle, and the fact the product only contains 20% juice is on the back. Using the terms “all natural” and “nectar” may also lead many people to conclude this is a 100% juice product.

In fact, the first two ingredients listed on the back of the label are water and sugar, and indeed they are “all natural”. Just how much sugar is in each bottle? An unbelievable 66 grams — which is roughly equivalent to over 16 teaspoons of sugar!

How sweet (and healthy) it isn’t. Many “juices” on the market are not pure juice, but this one seemed particularly surprising.

Under federal law, if a product is not 100% juice, it must be called “juice drink, juice cocktail or juice beverage.” There appears to be no minimum type size requirement for those terms in most cases.

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New Nutrition Guide’s “Plate” Uses New Math

The USDA last week unveiled its replacement for the decades’ old food pyramid, and calls it MyPlate.

It has generally received rave reviews and positive press for more clearly showing the types of things we should be eating daily and their proportions. If you read the details, however, you would see that what looks like roughly equal portions of five food groups at a meal is not what they suggest you eat. And that was the value of the old food pyramid — it better depicted relative quantities of each of the food groups that should be consumed daily.

Digging deeper into the “plate”, you discover what the actual amount of each category of food the government suggests we consume.

*MOUSE PRINT:

Here, for example, the government suggests that most people should eat three cups of dairy per day. Depending on the particular dairy food, that could be a good amount or a crazy amount.

It turns out, however, when they tell us to eat three cups of dairy a day, they really don’t mean three cups. But that is the unfortunate term they chose.

*MOUSE PRINT:

A cup of milk is a cup’s worth, and the same goes for yogurt. But when they tell us to eat a cup of cheese, they really mean to only eat as little as an ounce and half. Except for cottage cheese. A cup of cottage cheese should be two cups.

And the ice cream industry really must have lobbied the government hard, because a cup of ice cream is really a cup and half.

Confusing, huh?