Cocoa Krispies: Not a Health Food?

by Michael Dawson / November 7th, 2009

nestle_sept29_krispies_postHold onto your hats, boys and girls: Cocoa Krispies is apparently not a health food after all!

Advertising Age is reporting that, due to its fear of a backlash arising from “parental concerns that [its] advertising and packaging was preying on fears of the H1N1 virus,” Kellogg Company, the billion-dollar-a-year profit engine that peddles Cocoa Krispies and other junk food, is removing preposterous “anti-oxidant” claims from Cocoa Krispies boxes.

Here is Kellogg’s official announcement:

Kellogg Company today announced its decision to discontinue the immunity statements on Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereals.

Last year, Kellogg Company started the development of adding antioxidants to Rice Krispies cereals. This is one way the Company responded to parents indicating their desire for more positive nutrition in kids’ cereal.

While science shows that these antioxidants help support the immune system, given the public attention on H1N1, the Company decided to make this change. The communication will be on pack for the next few months as packaging flows through store shelves. We will, however, continue to provide the increased amounts of vitamins A, B, C and E (25% Daily Value) that the cereal offers.

We will continue to respond to the desire for improved nutrition, and we are committed to communicating the importance of nutrition to our consumers.

Let’s run that through our handy-dandy, unpatented Consumer Trap Marketing-to-English Translator, shall we?

The results:

Kellogg Company today announced its decision to discontinue the immunity statements on Kellogg’s Rice Krispies cereals. Meanwhile, we won’t tell you here that by “Rice Krispies,” we also mean “Cocoa Krispies.” Including that fact would disclose that we are basically selling candy here.

Last year, Kellogg Company started the development of adding antioxidants to Rice Krispies and Cocoa Krispies cereals. This is one way the Company responded to parents‘ indicating their desire for vulnerability to deceptive claims about more positive nutrition in kids’ cereal lives.

While science* shows suggests that these antioxidants may help support the immune system, given the public attention on that we know our vitamin-sprayed sugar crunch doesn’t have a prayer of preventing H1N1, the Company decided to make this change. The communication will be on pack for the next few months as packaging flows through store shelves. After all, it would cost us money to remove them now. We will, however, continue to provide spray on the increased amounts of vitamins A, B, C and E (25% Daily Value) that the cereal offers continues to provide us with an excuse for passing our product off as [wink, wink, make air quotes] “part of a nutritious breakfast.”

We will continue to respond to ignore both the desire for improved nutrition and the nutritional and economic inferiority of our mega-processed and packaged product to plain old whole-grain bread, and we are committed to communicating the importance suppressing knowledge of nutrition and home economics to among our consumers targets.

Fuck you, and goodnight.

* When science is even conceivably on our side, it is absolute truth. Climate change? Dangers of excessive sugar intake? Needs more research.

Michael Dawson is author of The Consumer Trap: Big Business Marketing in American Life (2004). He is the publisher of the blog The Consumer Trap, which aims to expose capitalism, marketing and market totalitarianism. Read other articles by Michael, or visit Michael's website.

This article was posted on Saturday, November 7th, 2009 at 9:00am and is filed under Children/Youth, Food/Nutrition.

3 comments on this article so far ...

Comments RSS feed

  1. Don Hawkins said on November 7th, 2009 at 10:54am #

    Snap Crackle Pop.

  2. Don Hawkins said on November 7th, 2009 at 11:23am #

    The Snap

    “It won’t be very long before we have to start thinking of the Arctic as an open sea. Man has taken the lid off the northern end of his planet and we can’t put that lid back on again”. Peter Wadhams, Professor of Ocean Physics and Head of the Polar Physics Group

    The Crackle

    Worldwide weather patterns unlike anything we human’s have seen

    The Pop

    The fight to survive and better to start now.

  3. Don Hawkins said on November 7th, 2009 at 12:53pm #

    When making his Oscar-winning 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, Gore arguably had it easy: it’s fairly straightforward to grip an audience when you’re portraying scenes of apocalyptic destruction. The new book pulls off a considerably more impressive feat. It focuses on solving the crisis, yet manages to be absorbing on a topic that is all too often – can we just come clean about this, please? – crushingly boring. Importantly, it seeks to enlist readers as political advocates for the cause, rather than just urging them to turn down the heating. “It’s important to change lightbulbs,” he says, in a well-burnished soundbite, “but more important to change policies and laws.” Or perhaps to break laws instead: peaceful occupations of the kind witnessed recently in the UK, he predicts, are only going to become more widespread. “Civil disobedience has an honourable history, and when the urgency and moral clarity cross a certain threshold, then I think that civil disobedience is quite understandable, and it has a role to play. And I expect that it will increase, no question about it.” People sometimes express incredulity that Gore, who was groomed for the presidency almost since birth, seems so resolved that he’ll never return to electoral politics. But here’s a vivid example of the benefits of life on the outside: how many serving politicians would feel able to come so close to urging people to commit trespass? Guardian

    Again getting the new’s from England and we are making progress the permit Al the permit as a start.