"food marketing" news and stories

The walls here at the Slashfood offices are hung with a number of flat-screen TV's, all broadcasting various news channels 24 hours a day. As of late, many of those screens are filled with painful images of oil-coated wildlife and a spewing brown plume that never sleeps. It's fair to say this sad event is weighing heavily on our collective minds, which is why this astute article from The Atlantic caught our attention: Writer Hank Cardello draws clever parallels between BP's mishandling of the oil disaster with another national nightmare -- obesity.

If executives take away his three lessons, maybe something good will come out of this nightmare after all.

[The Atlantic]

When I was growing up, we were a granola and Cheerios kind of family. Kix cereal was an occasional treat and we were allowed to pick out one sugar cereal a year (on our birthday). This didn't mean that we didn't beg for the other, less healthy cereals that we saw advertised to us during Saturday morning cartoons, but my mom was passionate about keeping brightly colored and sugared flakes, charms and balls out of our cereal bowls.

It seems like she was on to something, as according to a recent report, printed in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, the more heavily marketed a cereal is to children, the less healthy it is. Additionally, this same team of researchers at Yale University have found that the health claims made about childrens' cereals are often misleading and false.

According to the study's lead researcher, Dr. Marlene B. Schwartz, parents should seek out cereals that contains 4 grams of sugar per serving (about one teaspoon) or less and that they should aim for 4 grams of fiber per bowl of cereal.

[via Reuters]

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