"Parents misled by food lables"

[DoesntChristmasDragOn]

here

"Kellogg's Coco Pops cereal and milk bars are labelled as "a source of calcium, iron and six vitamins" and 63% of mothers in the survey thought they were healthy."

Really? they thought something containing Coco Pops is ^healthy"? I always mentally add "... and shedloads of fat and sugar" on the end when I read statements about what a food contains.

Having said that, it is wrong for manufacturers to deliberately mislead customers and there is no doubt that they are deliberately misleading them.

To paraphrase Rich Hall - 63% of mothers not smart enough to run away when someone approaches them with a clipboard!

They are probably healthy compared to giving your child ten John Player Specials and some gin. Probably.

Surely Sloe Gin counts as a portion of fruit? And vodka is, perhaps, wholegrain and a complex carbohydrate which is good, right?

I know someone who thinks that they are a healthy snack and sends them with her child to nursery as he is so fussy and will not eat fruit! Well, no shit! Who's surprised when he eats sugar all say long.

I love Coco Pops as a special treat, but really there is a clue in the name isn't there? What part of Coco Pops would make you think 'mmmm, sounds healthy"?

My lovely MIL believes that anything organic is automatically healthy, even if it is primarily fat and sugar.

I think that people are easily hoodwinked by this labelling, the manufacturers do it deliberately and it is disgraceful.

Not just on kids stuff, look at all the otehr products. Meat with meaningless "farm fresh" type label and picture of happy animal in a field, low fat foods that contain vast quantites of sugar.

Not everyone has the time, energy, inclination, know-how etc to read every single nutrition label and decipher what is what.

One of the responses in the BBC things summed it up. The person from the brand said "well thie breakfast bar contains far less sugar and fat than a bar of chocolate!". Well it may do but that is a ridiculous comparison, not many mothers would think that a bar of chocolate was a healthy snack but that is what your bar is implying it is. Why not compare it to an actual healthy snack?

It's liek saying "well yes I see your point about the wholegrain baby breakfast but please do remember it contains far less nicotine and tar than a pack of 20 rothmans".

They take the .

I assumed they were shown pictures of the product concerned or the actual box as part of the survey. I was collared by market research once before and there were pictures with a set of statements underneath to chose from.

There was a programme on recently where the presenter looked up all the apparently "healthy" claims she could make about her product, slapped them all on a box, showed it to unsuspecting members of the public and asked if they thought that what was inside would be healthy. They all said yes. Then it turned out to be a chocolate cake.

Obviously whether people were "duped" by the survey depends on how much info they were shown as the questions were asked. I think most educated people are aware that food labelling is massively open to interpretation. TBH, I don't tend to bother to read it. I buy coco pops occasionally as a treat for my DDs (and myself ) but am under no illusions that it is "healthy" (as compared to an apple, for example) I don't think I would be swayed to buy something specifically because of the claims on the packet.

After spending years reading labels due to health problems I can tell you one thing... from calpol to petit swiss, everything is somewhat unhealthy.

Thankfully, it takes a life time for that stuff to kill us.

SantaIsMyLoveSlave surely organic carrot cake is better for you than ordinary carrot cake? I'm going to keep telling myself that anyway!

There is no such thing as unhealthy food just an unhealthy diet.

some people just like to pander to their kids for a quiet life and try to appease their conscience by thinking well at least they are getting some vitamins and minerals (esp if they claim the kids won't eat fruit and veg).......and some others are just plain thick.

Coco pops etc in this house are a going on holiday treat, when we get the variety pack cereals.

LOW FAT is the MAJOR con, as most of the LOW FAT versions have more sugar than the regular (eg yoghurts etc)

It's not as simple as knowing that coco pops are unhealthy though. Museli can be unhealthy (sugar and salt), bran flakes can be unhealthy (salt, IIRC), cereals that aren't obviously sugar-laden can be unhealthy... and the claimed nutritional value depends on a 30g serving with milk - how many people measure out 30g?

Food packaging is deliberately opaque. Some of the big supermarkets refused to sign up to the Food Standards Agency's traffic lights labelling, an attempt to make it really obvious, and fiddle around with all sorts of factors, like saying ooh, as part of your total food intake for the day, 10g of fat is fine, so we'll class that as amber. Deliberately missing the point that 10g of fat in a product weighing, I dunno, 25g is quite a lot. Most people don't have the time to read the back of the pack in detail and compare it to another product.