"mislabeling" news and stories

Kellogg's, why did you try to fool us again? Yes, those blueberry bits in cereals and infamously lackluster packaged muffins from the gas station? Not real. Real sugar and food dye; but not berries from the berry bush. We can't say we're surprised, just officially disgusted.

It turns out, some of our biggest industry bakers are only good as colorists. A new video released by the Consumer Wellness Center last week shows that this is actually no secret. As we've seen before, the front of packages always sound better than the back. If you turn over a Frosted Mini Wheats Blueberry Muffin box, touting fresh blueberries on the front, you'll find an ingredients list with an item called "blueberry flavored crunchlets." Crunchlets -- a word we hope never becomes official -- is defined as a mix of sugars, soybean oil, red #40 and blue #2. Voilà, blueberry! Minus, of course, those real-deal elements: antioxidants, manganese, vitamins C and E, and dietary fiber.

You can also expect similar frauds in cereals, breads and muffins from Betty Crocker, Target and General Mills, whose Total Blueberry Pomegranate cereal contains neither blueberry nor pomegranate. Who to trust? A real baker. Or the makers of products like Natures' Path Organic Optimum Blueberry-Cinnamon Breakfast Cereal, which actually contains real blueberries and cinnamon.

Remember those Rice Krispies cereal boxes from 2009 that claimed the "Snap, Crackle, Pop" breakfast would "support your child's immunity?" This was right around the time parents were vaccine-crazy over the bird flu? As you might have guessed, that claim wasn't true. Neither was the company's claim that their Frosted Mini Wheats were "clinically shown to improve children's attentiveness by nearly 20%." And for that, Kellogg's is paying.

Last week, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) -- which regulates U.S. advertising -- announced a class-action settlement brought to the century-old, $13 billion company in the U.S. District Court of California, thanks to the laws of advertising that ban misleading and inaccurate marketing claims (or what we like to call the "That just ain't right!" ruling).