Should the government get involved?
Check out this video from ABC news concerning the present state of affairs of cereal boxes.
Cereal companies are claiming that their products are healthy options, despite the fact that they contain tons of sugar and dyes. How far can companies go with misleading information before the government should get involved?
I find this fascinating 1) because people don’t stop and think, “Wow that’s a lot of sugar maybe it’s not so healthy” and 2) that it’s actually taken this long for the FDA to purpose a new method for labeling food… these labels have been around as far back as I can remember reading cereal boxes as a child.
It’s outrageous that companies can make scientific claims with really no scientific data to back it up, or rather with contradictory data and yet consumers continue to buy into it.
It all sounds a bit too familiar to the tobacco product ads that originally claimed cigarettes were a “healthy option.”
[via abcnews]
Popularity: 13% [?]
I think the government should get involved with regulating what companies claim because a lot of people do not stop and actually think about what they are buying. I know when I am grocery shopping I get so overwhelmed that I just pick up whatever looks appealing; health is the last thing on my mind. One of the biggest problems in the U.S is obesity so it is really important for companies to be responsible and report the right nutritional values of their products. It’s not fair that companies take advantage of current trends with false advertising.
Considering the
Considering the lack of knowledge even specialists have, I do not want a group of unspecialized and incompetent paper pushers investigating something that quite frankly is not important and should be a familial issue. If you do not want your kids eating sugar, buy Corn Flakes. As for the cigarette comparison, nicotine kills and is an addicting substance, which makes it a little more of a threat to common people than sugar.
False advertising is a “problem” but if you want to correct word manipulation in our society you have to go MUCH deeper than cereal boxes lying to kids and saying it is okay to eat 88% sugar, 12% other stuff for breakfast. We have a near productless economy, a healthcare and education system that would be sufficient for rodents and an inability to agree on anything that would actually assist anyone. Frankly I cannot believe that this government knows what it is doing anymore, and has not known since…oh I do not know…1916. Why make it worse with an issue that is not new nor that threatening. Corporations that lack any moral sense of honesty, in other words the average business man, on the scale of our problems rank just above slug infestation in Tennesse and just below rabid squirrels in Central Park.