Pom Wonderful made such outlandish claims
that the Federal Trade Commission stepped in and told them to cut it out.
By
The new
comedy show Last Week Tonight with John Oliver included a
well-deserved riff on the food industry in its first episode.
Oliver, who you
might know from his work on Comedy Central’s fake news program, The Daily Show, went after
two well-deserved targets: Pom Wonderful pomegranate juice and Coca-Cola.
He
refers to a court case in which Pom Wonderful took on Coca-Cola for its
Pomegranate Blueberry Minute Maid drink that is made of 99 percent apple and
grape juice.
Have you
heard about the extraordinary health benefits of pomegranates? More
antioxidants than blueberries! At some point in the last decade or so,
pomegranates took off as the ultimate health food. Or one of them, anyway,
along with other superfoods like green tea, açaí, maca, and goji berries.
And all
of these foods are truly healthy. Some of them even taste good. But that
doesn’t mean one must eat them to the exclusion of all other foods.
So-called
superfoods usually are good for you, but variety is the key
to a healthy diet. So is eating whole foods. And most whole foods provide
wonderful health benefits, even if researchers haven’t isolated and published
scientific articles on them yet.
So,
sure, eat a pomegranate. I love sprinkling pomegranate seeds on my salads. But
also eat a wide variety of other fruits, plus grains, nuts, seeds, veggies, and
legumes.
However,
that’s not the message we got from the people behind Pom Wonderful. They made
such outlandish, unsupported claims about pomegranate juice’s power to reduce
the risk of heart disease, prostate cancer, and erectile dysfunction that the
Federal Trade Commission stepped in and told them to cut it out.
As John
Oliver put it, the Pom
Wonderful v. Coca-Cola case
“is actually about Pom Wonderful saying: Hey, we didn’t spend years misleading
people about the health benefits of our snake oil for you to come in and lie
about how much snake oil you have in your products.’”
Finding
superfoods that will provide the key to health is an attractive idea, but it’s
not realistic. Relying on marketers to key you in to which foods rank as
superfoods is even sillier. They just want you to buy whatever they are
selling.
Once
they hook you into believing they are selling the magic food for health or
weight loss, they can charge big bucks.
Worse
yet are the superfood knockoffs you’ll see, like pomegranate martinis, which
might be made with artificial pomegranate flavored syrup that contains no
antioxidants whatsoever.
Another
winner I’ve seen: cookies laced with a powdered form of the hyped-up maca
plant. I don’t think you get credit for eating a health food when you mix it in
with butter, flour, and sugar and bake it into a cookie.
Unfortunately,
even 100 percent fruit juice doesn’t get a free pass, even when it’s actually
pomegranate juice instead of 99 percent apple and grape juice.
While
fruit is terrifically good for you, its juice provides vitamins and lots of
sugar without the fiber to fill you up. You might eat one apple in a sitting,
but you could eat the juice of several apples in a few gulps. The same goes for
pomegranate juice. Down a glass of it and you’ll be full of antioxidants, but
you will be swallowing way too much sugar for your own good. You’re better off
just eating a pomegranate.
Sadly,
there’s just no free or effortless healthy lunch. We don’t get a shortcut to
healthy eating by binging on green tea ginger blueberry pomegranate goji
hempseed granola bars. And we can’t rely on advertising to educate us about
nutrition.
OtherWords columnist
Jill Richardson is the author of Recipe
for America: Why Our Food System Is Broken and What We Can Do to Fix It.
OtherWords.org