Dumb choices

I have one tip for making healthier choices: Anyone who recommends eating Froot Loops as a "smart choice"? Don't listen to anything they tell you to do.

How could Froot Loops (which consist of over 40% sugar) have possibly gotten this green check mark as a stamp of approval in a new program to help supermarket shoppers figure out what the "smart choices" are?

Here's an attempted explanation (all these quotes are from the New York Times story in the first link):

Dr. [Eileen] 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.”

Even if you agree with that advice in that particular context, that's just what's needed: context. Not everyone is a parent shopping for their young children. Universal, binary advice -- eat this, don't eat that -- doesn't give you any context. [In the comments: Is she even right about her contrived hypothetical?]

But this might be the biggest problem:

[Kennedy] said ... 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.’ ”

So the message is: if it doesn't have that label, it's not one of the smarter choices. Doesn't that mean a food with no label at all can't possibly be one of the smarter choices? A commenter on MetaChat draws our attention to this point from Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food:

Avoid food products that make health claims. For a food product to make health claims on its package it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be a processed food than a whole food.

Of course, the "smart choices" program

“was paid for by industry and when industry put down its foot and said this is what we’re doing, that was it, end of story.”

That account comes from Michael Jacobson, executive director of an advocacy group called the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which "was part of a panel that helped devise the Smart Choices nutritional criteria, until he quit last September." He adds:

“You could start out with some sawdust, add calcium or Vitamin A and meet the criteria."

A better policy would be to just tell everyone to read the aforementioned In Defense of Food and Mark Bittman's Food Matters.