Thursday, January 29, 2015

Sobey's #BetterFoodForAll Campaign Promotes Health, Sales and Woo

I really wanted to love this campaign.

Sobey's Better Food for All program positions itself as a campaign designed to increase the love of real food, cooking and health, and so with hope in mind, I headed over to their site to find out.

Parts of it really are great. There are easy to make nutritious recipes courtesy of Jamie Oliver. There are Twitter, Facebook and Instagram campaigns where people can share their real food successes. There's also some helpful posts on the blog including some tips for getting kids into the kitchen more and some ideas for packing a healthy lunch, but much of the content is doing a disservice to readers.

In just the first few entries readers were told that lemon juice improves body alkalinity (what you eat has no bearing on your blood's alkalinity), that the sugar-delivery vehicle known as kids' yogurt was, "the ultimate grab-and-go snack" (might as well be feeding kids melted ice-cream), promoted the magical benefits of "fresh-pressed juice" (there aren't any), and told people that you need to refuel after you work up a sweat (unless you've sweat for a truly heroic amount of time, you almost certainly don't).

Sobey's, while I'm incredibly supportive of your aim of improving cooking skills and getting kids and families back into the kitchen, educating the public about healthful eating should by definition exclude both pitching them crappy products and publishing and disseminating to them non-evidence based woo.