That big red heart is a glorified health claim, designed to catch your eye and sell food products, in this case highly processed food products. How often do you see fancy packaging and health claims on fruits and vegetable in the produce aisle? Marion Nestle, in her book "What To Eat" shares her knowledge of food politics in terms we can all understand. Read on to see just how this big red heart got on your cereal box in the first place.
Prior to 1990, the FDA didn't allow health claims and disease prevention messages on food packages. They expected food companies, like pharmaceutical companies, to prove claims with scientific studies. Food companies knew they couldn't prove that, for example, eating a certain breakfast cereal would prevent heart disease. A cereal is only one food eaten by many people who eat many different foods that can affect many risk outcomes. Companies lobbied hard for the right to, alternatively, "inform the public". Finally caving to them, Congress ended up agreeing and forced the FDA to authorize health claims on food packages where there was "significant scientific agreement". Some health claims were allowed, but not all. Lobbying continued. In 1994 Congress passed the Dietary supplement and Health and Education Act authorizing structure/function claims for herbal supplements. Once food companies got wind of this, they sued the FDA for the right to make these same structure/function claims on food products. In 1997 the FDA passed an act that lightened the language from "significant scientific agreement" to "substantiated", a must less restrictive regulation. Since then, almost everytime the FDA said no to a food companies' health food claim, they were taken to court and usually lost. The courts often ruled in favor of food companies on the First Amendment grounds of freedom of speech. Marion Neslte comments, "Any sensible person might think that the Founding Fathers devised the First Amendment to protect political dissent rather than the right of food marketers to use overblown health claims on cereal boxes." Aha the right to free speech.
The take-a-way here is that regulations surrounding health claims on food products are very loose, with barely any disclaimers. While a diet rich in whole grains is associated with a decreased risk of heart disease and cancer, you'd have a lot of convincing to do to prove that eating a specific breakfast cereal will actually protect you against these illnesses. In this example, it is the fiber in the whole grain that does the protecting. When you look at a cereal that does have whole grains, when it is followed by 30 or so more ingredients and very little to no fiber at all, what protection are you really getting? My advice is to get back into the produce aisle and completely disregard any health claims as merely an expensive marketing campaign targeting your pocketbook.
