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“Healthy?” It still may be junk food

By: NWHF Staff | Posted on: August 16th, 2011 | 1 comments | Share:
Categories: Food & Nutrition • Public Health

by Craig Mosbaek, CHP Contributor. 

“It’s not junk food, it’s organic!”  That’s what my daughter said when I called something junk food.  Yes, it was high-fat, high-calorie food, and organic.

Apparently, adults make these mistakes too.  The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity just released a study about how parents interpret health claims on cereal boxes. Parents were shown the front panel from actual cereal boxes which made nutrition claims.

The cereals all had more sugar than average.  But, parents in the study often said that the nutrition claims on the package made them more likely to buy it.  The study concludes that, “These results affirm the need for increased regulation in the USA to protect consumers from the potentially misleading information conveyed by nutrition-related claims.”

Previous research showed that the typical cereal box contains three nutrition claims.  I once saw a cereal in the store that gave you about a dozen reasons to buy it.  Some of the reasons were not health related, such as the box was made from recycled material and 1% of the profits went to help wildlife habitat.

But the cereal still had too much sugar, I mean, too much organic evaporated cane juice.