Will We Say Cheerio To Cheerios Health Claims?
The FDA is cracking down on General Mills’ health claim on their Cheerios boxes. The claim, which is rather prominently displayed, says eating Cheerios will lower your cholesterol by 4% in 6 weeks. Even if “clinical trials” have shown such improvement, the issue is that General Mills is making a claim that its product works like a statin drug. And, the FDA wrote in a letter to the company, if Cheerios works like a drug then it should be regulated as a drug.
From the FDA’s warning letter:
Based on claims made on your product’s label, we have determined that your Cheerios® Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal is promoted for conditions that cause it to be a drug because the product is intended for use in the prevention, mitigation, and treatment of disease.
Comments on related blog posts say that going after the childhood icon (first finger snack of many) will make the FDA look like a bad guy. Others think they should be focusing on the more extreme issues that endanger people like salmonella and e. coli contaminations. In a perfect(ly sane) world, the FDA would have the budget to do both at once.
Choosing Cheerios as the first battle against misleading health claims was an excellent choice. First of all, it is a popular food item that most consumers are familiar with and its health claims are probably well known by the public. For those reasons, the disappearance or even the challenging of those health claims will be noticed. In light of its slow reaction (not exactly their fault) to the salmonella outbreak, etc., this shows that the FDA is taking affirmative action to protect people’s health.
It also sends a powerful message to the food industry that the FDA is ready to challenge products and even the big guys are not untouchable. Furthermore, if the FDA has the guts to go up against General Mills and its lobbyist machine, smaller companies had better watch out.
Indeed, this action makes those campaigning for more food safety hopeful that the FDA will go after supplements next. Thanks to the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 the FDA has very little power to regulate the supplement market.
Marion Nestle wrote a great article for the San Francisco Chronicle that details how that act was the downfall of FDA oversight of supplements. Below is just a snippet from Nestle’s article. She is explaining why a store can still sell apricot pits as a health remedy even though it produces cyanide in the body:
…If the label of that container of apricot pits says nothing about cancer prevention or treatment, the FDA leaves it alone.
The FDA has to. As I discussed in my book “Food Politics
,” Congress, under pressure from the supplement industry and supporters who wanted the freedom to choose even ineffective supplements if they wanted to, passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA, pronounced “D’Shay”). The supplement industry drafted the language of this act, which essentially deregulated these products.
Congress passed DSHEA on the basis of two quite questionable assumptions: that supplements are basically harmless, and that supplement-makers are basically honest. The law does not require supplement manufacturers to demonstrate the safety or effectiveness of their products to the FDA before selling them. Instead, the FDA must prove a supplement harmful by providing documentation from clinical trials or multiple case reports in court – a tedious process.
That is really just the tip of the iceburg. I encourage everyone to read Marion Nestle’s article in full. It is truly infuriating how little power the FDA has and how difficult it is to enforce what little authority they do have. Let’s hope that the Cheerios warning is the first step in a longterm, system-wide campaign for better health and more strict, science-based regulations.
On that note, President Obama’s Food Safety Working Group held its first open listening session on May 13th. Here are some of the talking points from USDA Secretary Vilsack:
- Food Safety is of the highest concern for all of us here today. While Americans enjoy one of the safest food supplies in the world, we have witnessed too many outbreaks that make us worry that the food on our dinner plate or in our child’s lunch box will harm instead of nourish. This is not acceptable.
- As many people know first hand, in this economy we do not have unlimited resources. Nor can we simply pass higher food production costs onto struggling consumers. We must ensure that we are allocating our food safety resources effectively and efficiently. That means focusing the most attention on the products that have the most potential to cause harm.
- The safety of a product should not be determined by where it originated. We live in a global community and by working more closely with our partners around the world we can make sure that the food the US is importing is as safe as the food we are exporting.
Hhhmm…I don’t think Cheerios have the “most potential to cause harm”, but anyway they are not under the USDA’s jurisdiction. If the USDA worked on the ‘big’ stuff as they claim they will, and the FDA worked on the ‘little’ stuff, we could be in pretty good shape. Of course, that is one mighty huge if…
May 15, 2009
Tags: change, FDA, food safety, Health, marketing, policy Posted in: Health, Politics, Science & Technology
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