Wednesday, January 23, 2008

Heart and Stroke agrees Health Check sub-optimal

Gee that's reassuring.

Terry Dean, General Manager of Health Check from an article published last Saturday in the Ottawa Citizen, apparently agreed that some Health Check products may have a sugar or sodium content that is higher than optimal.

He also reported both to the Canadian Press and the Ottawa Citizen that Health Check was:

A. Not a diet program
B. Not a sodium reduction program
C. Not a fat reduction program

Ok, so let me get this straight.

According to the General Manager of Health Check, if you choose foods using the Health Check, that won't help you reduce your weight, won't help you reduce your sodium, won't help you reduce your fat and will possibly provide you with products that have admittedly higher than recommended amounts of sugar and sodium.

Fantastic?

So what is Health Check good for again?

Oh yeah, it generates close to $3,000,000 in annual revenue for the Heart and Stroke Foundation.

I wonder if changing their criteria making them more stringent and actually evidence-based would limit the number of companies and products to which they could sell their logo?

Do you think that would affect their revenue?

Stay tuned tomorrow for an exploration of ALL of the criteria used by Health Check (don't worry, there are only 9 so it won't be that long of a post).