Does Kellogg's promise to only promote nutritious food to children during Saturday morning cartoons signal a significant trend in nutrition awareness?

No

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by John D. Johnson

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With its recent promises to improve its foods and protect kids, Kellogg's may very well be on the right track. It may have hit upon an encouraging new trend in corporate responsibility, but consumers should be on that track without the help of a huge corporation.

The Kellogg's company may prove itself to be a pioneer in an industry rife with those who will use any gimmick available to increase sales, and for such dishonest companies, their best accomplice in this ruse is the American consumer himself, whose nutritional I.Q. has fallen in recent decades to new depths.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, high-carb snack foods were marketed noisily as "Fat Free", even if they'd never contained fat at any point during their existence. This includes items such as pretzels, rice cakes, or pasta. The American consumer, increasingly sedentary and nutritionally ignorant, snatched these items up, thinking himself to have discovered some long-concealed secret to good health. Failing to notice that he'd probably already been eating a steady diet of similar foods, Mister America hoarded for himself still more, munching on the high-carb snacks in his easy chair as the flickering glow of late-night TV lulled him off to sleep. In his comfy slumber, of course, his high-carb intake became body fat in short order.

Still thinking fat to be his only enemy, Joe Consumer took joyful notice of the latest in logic-cheating chemistry with the dawn of Olestra, the fake fat known also by the commercial name O'Lean. Early reports heralded such "trans fats" as a breakthrough in snack food production, claiming that the lack of natural components in Olestra would not only prevent it from becoming body fat, but also that the chemical would be quick to exit the body.

Olestra did keep one of its promises: that of not becoming body fat. Since it was fully synthetic, the human digestive system's varied parts would see the chemical passing through and ask themselves, "Anybody know what this stuff is?" And we can surmise that their unanimous conclusion was, "I've never seen it, so I'm not touching it." Consequently, the under-informed buyer suffered either of two unpleasant fates: diarrhea or constipation.

The American shopper thought he finally caught the break he needed when he was told that his enemy was not the much-maligned (and horribly unspecified) "fat", but rather the dreaded carbohydrate. Suddenly, bunless bacon cheeseburgers were in; bread, biscuits, and potatoes were out. The half-truths of the anti-carb craze produced reckless consumptions of high-fat protein sources, and in the process, record-level cholesterol intakes.

Today, the shady marketing continues. KFC has launched an almost hilarious new campaign to reassure its customers that the fried chicken giant no longer uses "trans fats". Here is precisely where the uneducated get suckered. Since when was trans fat the problem with KFC? The drawback to finger-lickin' goodness has always been the threats posed by saturated fat. Apparently, it is too much to ask the average American consumer to do any research that extends beyond the operation of a remote and the viewing of a 15-second commercial.

So, into this jungle where the slick prey on the clueless, Kellogg's proposes a more far-reaching plan, promising to make its foods more nutritious or else cease marketing them to kids. All of this is encouraging.

But this fact remains: we consumers should not need the food industry to do for us what we should do for ourselves. And sadly enough, while Kellogg's foods may indeed change for the better, many of us will not. Many will choose instead to suffer from continued bad habits that yield the same old health problems and their manifold woes.

Such is the lot of folks who want more than their daily allowance of excess and indulgence - with a side order of ignorance.

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