Thursday, May 14, 2009

Cheery-O! Right-Wing Bloggers Get Their Test Results.


Cereal hasn't gotten this much attention since Seinfeld was still in production.
From
HealthNews.com:

In a letter to Cheerios’ manufacturer General Mills, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned that the wording on the cereal’s box suggests it is intended for use in preventing or treating heart disease by lowering cholesterol, claims only FDA-approved drugs are allowed to make. They also pointed out that federal regulations do not permit companies to quantify the benefit of their foods, which General Mills does when it claims an average 4 percent reduction in bad cholesterol. “We certainly don’t have any issues with the safety of Cheerios,” Stephen Sundlof, director of the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, said in an interview. “We just believe that the labeling on this particular product has gone beyond what the science supports.”   
The agency says it does allow whole-grain products to carry certain claims about reducing heart disease and cancer risk, but they must state explicitly that such foods need to be part of diets that are also low in saturated fats and cholesterol and high in fiber-rich fruits and vegetables as well as grains. “The claim on your website leaves out any reference to fruits and vegetables, to fiber content, and to keeping the levels of saturated fat and cholesterol in the diet low,” the FDA letter said. “Therefore, your claim does not convey that all these factors together reduce the risk of heart disease and does not enable the public to understand the significance of the claim in the context of total daily diet.”


Cheerios updated their website in response.
And because it's the Obama FDA, the right-wing nuthouse is predictably in high dudgeon.

From Reuters, with a hat-tip to The Best-Looking Man In Show Business Today, who drolly notes that the Obama-fixated right must have picked up on the fact that Cheerios are, indeed, "shaped like O's":

"It's fairly obvious to me why the Obama administration is going after Cheerios over possible deceptive advertising," says the Deadenders blog. "Babies love them more then him."

"This is the kind of irritating, intrusive nonsense that makes people weary of their government and every smarmy bureaucratic microbe in it," writes David Crocker of the Behind Blue Lines blog.

...Never mind that Obama almost certainly had no idea that his FDA was planning to go after Cheerios.

Food seems to be a common theme among crazy conservatives. For them, wholesome, "American" foods are a-OK. Eurocommie foods are right out. "Washington raised ciggie taxes to pay for SCHIP expansion and are [sic] gearing up to raise soda taxes to pay for Obamacare," writes the reliably nutty Michelle Malkin. "No vice is safe from the health police. Dijon mustard and arugula exempted, of course."

"So I guess now the Communist-in-Chief will declare a War on Cereal," rants Ed Anger of the Weekly World News, proving the increasing irrelevance of old-school parody. You can't tell it from the real thing.

...Note, by the way that none of these critics actually addresses the substance of the FDA's argument.

But then, do these toxic troglodytes ever base an argument on substance?

allvoices

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

When something like this happens it makes me realize how vulnerable we are to advertising. It seems like the general population should know enough about cholesterol and their health that a cereal should not have this kind of influence. It can be as simple as reading a couple of knowledgeable health sources and watching what you eat... though I guess Cheerios is misleading us all of a sudden.

JohnnyRussia said...

I don't know about Cheerios, but "Winston tastes good like a cigarette should."

Anonymous said...

I was madder than a plastic surgeon with a broken putter at the reference to Ed Anger because there really is no Ed Anger. Ed Anger was created by Weekly World News writer Rafael Klinger in 1979. From 1990 Anger's columns were written by the paper's editor Eddie Clontz until his departure in 2001. Since then a variety of staffers at the WWN have rotated in as Ed Anger. Anyone who has done a modicum of research should know there is no real Anger and that his personae is the prototype for the Colbert Report lunacy.
check this out..
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/30/business/media/30weekly.html

TBLMISBT

JohnnyRussia said...

I laughed like hell at Mitchell's inclusion of Ed Anger. And if not for WWN, I'm not sure I ever would have discovered who actually killed JFK, either.