Thursday, February 15, 2007

No Berries in Disney's Berry Crunch Cereal


Nope, no berries in General Mills' new Mickey's Clubhouse Berry Crunch Cereal, but there is a giant Mickey Mouse to entice children who are too young to discern the difference between truth and advertising to ask their parents to buy it.

Are you surprised?

You probably shouldn't be.

Disney has a long history of pimping out its characters to market crappy food to kids, and lying on labels, especially about fruit content, is apparently quite commonplace.

Last month the Strategic Alliance for Healthy Foods and Activity Environments in a report entitled, "Where's the fruit?" examined the ingredients of what they felt were the most aggressively advertised children's food with fruit claims on the label.

In total they looked at 37 products and found that more than half of them contained absolutely no fruit at all!

Some great stats in that report (and by great, I mean scary):

  • $10 billion per year is spent marketing food to children in North America.

  • 83% of food advertised during children's television programs featured one of snack food, fast food or sweets.

  • $3 billion per year is spent on food packaging to snag children.

  • Children see an average of one food ad for every 5 minutes of Saturday morning TV that they watch.

    Lesson to be learned here - read your labels!

    If we read the label above you'll find that while you don't get fruit, you do get two different kinds of sugar, red 40, yellow 6, and blue 1.

    MMMmmmm blue 1.

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