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.

"Food rules" for Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan -- author of the excellent In Defense of Food, which I'm in the middle of reading -- asked for people's "food rules."

New York Times readers gave over 2,500 of them in the comments of this blog post.

Do you think it's someone's job to read all of these? I just made it through the first page of comments, and here are a few I liked:

My main food rule is “cook your own food from scratch.” This was as much a food rule growing up in my family as it was a budget rule. Same for “eat your vegetables.” I threw out “clean your plate,” though.

— Heather

If I can pronounce all of the ingredients and can create a mental picture of the ingedients in a food, then I eat it. If I cannot, then I do not eat it.

— Jessica Neece

Our rule is simple: fresh food, varied meals, portion control. It’s a variant of Julia Child’s reaction to food fetishism, a French truth: pretty much anything is ok as long as it is real food and as long as we eat all kinds of foods routinely.

— hazbin

When the children were little, it was 7 vegetables at each dinner (garlic and herbs counted, for example, and two kinds of mushrooms = two vegetables). Now that we’re only grownups at home, we rely on local organic grocers and farmers’ markets for seasonal products and a little color on the dinner plate, but are no longer doctrinal about the 7-veg rule.

— Demington

Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored.

— DS

If man didn’t eat it 10,000 years ago you shouldn’t eat it now.

— Greg

If you love to eat but hate to cook, marry someone who enjoys cooking. It will provide a lifetime of happier, healthier eating. (And cleaning up the kitchen burns calories.)

— Jessica Rodocker

If you haven’t been to the farm where it’s from and seen how they treat their animals you shouldn’t been eating it.

— John Deserio

(Shallots photo by Don LaVange.)