CPGmatters: Too Many Nutrition Programs Compete with MyPyramid
Through a special arrangement, presented here for discussion is an excerpt of a current article from the monthly e-zine, CPGmatters.
As he ends his 15-month tenure leading the federal government's MyPyramid food-guidance program to a new apex, Brian Wansink is troubled by growing competition to MyPyramid that is posed by nutrition-rating programs launched in grocery stores by individual companies ranging from food and beverage manufacturers to large supermarket chains.
"My concern with a lot of these programs is twofold," the food marketing professor at Cornell University told CPGmatters. "One is that they can sometimes be confusing to consumers, because it's not very transparent how they decide what score to give a product - or how many check marks or smiley faces. In most cases, that's proprietary, and they say, 'Trust us.'"
"The second thing is that the goal of these programs shouldn't be necessarily to get a person to buy whole wheat Pop Tarts instead of regular Pop Tarts, but to get people to eat in balance. And my fear is that if people end up eating by the stars or by the numbers, it can lead them to eat incrementally healthier but not globally healthier - you can eat totally out of balance."
And Professor Wansink has a third concern: The more distracted the American public, retailers and CPG manufacturers become by the cacophony of other nutrition-ratings systems out there, the less they will be able to focus on what he believes is the most valuable diet-planning tool of all: MyPyramid.
Released in 2005, MyPyramid replaced the long-used federal Food Guide Pyramid that the government launched in 1992 and which, in turn, had extended the U.S. Agriculture Department's long-established efforts to help American citizens figure out how to have healthy diets.
"With so many of these [programs], it becomes a House of Babel," said Professor Wansink, head of the Food & Brand Lab at Cornell and author of Marketing Nutrition: Soy, Functional Foods, Biotechnology and Obesity. "That's why we stand behind MyPyramid: It doesn't say, 'Buy this,' or, 'Don't buy this,' but it demystifies what you're getting in a processed food."
Discussion Question: Are all the competing nutrition-rating programs diluting the message behind MyPyramid? Do you agree they're only confusing consumers and their simplicity could be promoting out-of-balance diets? On the other hand, what is the value in retailers and vendors developing their own proprietary programs?