Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Lots of your tax dollars, not even remotely hard at work.


Talk about badvertising.

I blogged once before about the uselessness of the new %DV campaign.

That's the campaign that tells Canadians to look at the percent daily values of foods' nutrition fact panels to choose more of the ones they want and less of the ones they don't. Basically it promotes blind nutritionism and explicitly teaches Canadians not to care about actual foods, but rather about useless things like what percentage of daily vitamin A they have in them.

Well guess what? Now Health Canada's spending our hard earned money by buying advertising space in magazines and food packaging to spread this completely unhelpful, and potentially even harmful means of evaluating foods.

And why?

Well presumably Health Canada must think their current nutrition fact panels are confusing to Canadians.

So here's a thought. Health Canada, putting aside the utility of your educational messaging, if you think that our nutrition fact panels are so confusing that you need to mount a tax-payer funded campaign to help people understand how to use them, don't you think that perhaps instead it might be smarter to fix the food labels themselves and then not spend our hard earned money?

Just sayin'.