This week sees yet another exposure of the marketing hype associated with Food Woo, this time in amongst the yoghurt. Manufacturers have for a number of years been promoting probiotic yoghurt on the grounds that it is good for your health. We've had advertising telling us about good and bad bacteria, persuading us to buy yoghurt because it is good for our health. Now their stories are unravelling.
In Europe recently, the claims were investigated and checked for evidence. The European Food Standards Agency evaluated 523 health claims covering foods, vitamins, minerals, and the like and they found that around one third we justified. These were the claims mainly about the functions of essential vitamins and minerals, dietary fibre, and fatty acids. In other words, where they repeated the knowledge demonstrated by scientific enquiry, the claims were justified. Of the remaining claims, half of them couldn't be investigated properly because the marketers failed to identify the active ingredient. The rest were simply false.
Not mentioning the active ingredient is an excellent way to avoid the charge of misleading people, or even fraud. If you don't identify the active ingredient, you can't been shown to be misleading people. But they've been caught out by the converse. If they don't identify the agent, they can't legitimately claim it has an effect.
European Food Standards Agency
The story is interesting in the US as well because recently, Dannon, the marketers of Activia yoghurt, agreed to settle a claim out of court making available $35 million to reimburse disatisfied customers.
The problem, as with much of food Woo, is the mixing of established scientific knowledge with unfounded claims, generalising from science which suggests a possible link to claims about health. It is a good sign that these claims are being challenged though it's still very profitable for companies like Dannon to pay out $35 million and make some minor marketing changes - it will barely affect their sales because the advertising has already had an effect. And the customers who are dissatisfied are most unlikely to claim - we can bet that they won't spend all of that $35 million. In the meantime, the disinformation and confusion about diet and human biology continues to enable sales of Food Woo and make the big manufacturers profits from the false hopes.
Bob Lloyd has studied in four universities and has degrees in Biochemistry, Mathematics, and Computer Science. After a long career in publishing, teaching, and software engineering, he is now retired and lives in Andalucia in the South of Spain with his wife and rather ancient cat.
