Several of these completely surprised me. I had never considered some of these tricks before.
Using a tiny serving size to conceal something that’s actually in the product is slick.
I already knew the claim that a product doesn’t contain something, might be meaningless. Like saying water contains no caffeine. Of course it doesn’t because it never did.
One of my favorites that’s not in your list is how manufacturers will use multiple kinds of sweeteners in foods so they don’t have to list sugar (or some other sweetener) as the primary or secondary ingredient in it.
I remember being pissed off that Splenda advertises 0 calories, yet the second ingredient is dextrose, a sugar, which has calories. The packets contain 3.36 (kilo)calories, but it’s rounded down. It also has maltodextrin.
On the other hand, Tic Tac seems more honest “The 1½ Calorie Breath Mint.”
“Gluten-free water” is a dumb marketing thing, but vodka isn’t out of left field as it’s usually made from grain (very rarely potatoes, these days).
Non-alcoholic isn’t the same as alcohol free. Could cause problems. I drank near beer at home in my teens. My parents felt the tiny .5% wasn’t enough to worry about.
Made with Real fruit should mean what it sounds like. Frustrating that it doesn’t.
The asshole part of me loved that list because I work with a girl who downs multivitamins and is a super-health freak and is pretty annoying about it…and 1/2 of this list directly contradicts the shit she gives me. Too bad I can’t passively-aggressively send this to her.
I like the list, however the “labeling gluten free of products that don’t have gluten in the first place” isn’t a bad thing IMO. Most people don’t even know what gluten is, much less that you can’t have any. So it’s not “deceptive” to say a naturally gluten-free product is such, it’s just providing information to a consumer-base that might not know this.
I don’t think it’s overstatement to say that every food label from a major food conglomerate, and most of those from smaller (but still national or major regional) producers is deceptive somewhere - if not containing an outright falsehood, then a deceptively-worded statement or at least pompous meaninglessness like “Gluten Free!” on a product that has never contained gluten (or sugar, or salt, or caffeine, or whatever they’re trumpeting the lack of).
Besides marketing generalities and the assumed push to out-do one’s shelf competitors. there’s the special case of the food conglomerates, who do business on something like a war footing, with winner-take-all (all the shelf space, all the customers) being the perpetual goal. (Which is not “normal business”; even Apple and GM don’t view 100% of each market as rightfully theirs the way CoCoCo, Frito-Lay and ConAgra do.)
A good part of the problem can be assigned to the victory of the nutrition panel, which was fought tooth and nail by the food producers at every step and still has weasel-wording and omissions. It seems that the tacit cost of that regulated data and disclosure was that the FDA and other agencies got a little blinder to the content of the rest of the label, to the point where what truth lies inside the black box is almost wholly counterweighted by fantasy and BS everywhere outside it.
My poster child for this is, of course, Nutella. Before all the defenders jump up, I’ll say again that I have no problem with Nutella as it was sold for decades, mostly in Europe - in small jars, as a chocolate-y dessert or snack spread. But in the US, sold in larger and larger jars (up to one freakin’ kilo or over two pounds), and with an almost shockingly deceptive label outside of the black box… yeah, I got a thing in for it.
Here’s a current Nutella label in the US. Yum. “Hazelnut spread with skim milk and cocoa.” What a pretty flower… what does it represent? The pretty green sprigs of leaves… mmm, healthy and fresh. Big glass of milk, good for every body. And look how carefully those giant hazelnuts are being peeled.
However… unless that’s one tiny knife, that’s about three ounces of the stuff spread over a huge slice of bread. It’s a pretty clear message that you’re supposed to slather the stuff around like PB or jam, so yep, you’ll need the big jar. Let’s look at the bad news now… oh, my.
Not too much health in those numbers. 40%+ palm oil, 40%+ sugar. 13% dried hazelnuts. (Even PB has to be 90% ground nuts.) And some very small remaining amount dried skim milk and cocoa. Does that square with “hazelnut spread with milk and cocoa” or is it closer to the European original of “Chocolate hazelnut spread”… on much smaller jars? Just for comparison, here’s one for chocolate frosting - spot the differences? (Me, neither… but the idea of eating chocolate frosting as a snack is a standard joke, not something Choosy Moms Choose.)
And per tablespoon, you’ve got 100 calories, 50 of which (and 11 grams) are from fat, and… not much else. Per tablespoon, which was about the serving size until the US distributor decided to market it like real nut spreads, as something to feed kids by the gobbet.
The longer you look at the variant labels, the nutrition listings and the comparative marketing, the more you realize it may as well be a jar of pure bullshit. But then, as I started with, you’re welcome to find a food product on your grocery store shelf, sourced from any major maker, that doesn’t have outright deception in the labeling and marketing. And usually for no good reason except to beat those other guys to the sale… to hell with the buyer’s health.
I don’t buy processed foods very often, but when I do, I make it a point to review the nutrition facts label.
Come to think of it, that’s probably why I don’t buy processed foods very often…
I just discovered that the packet of conveniently, sliced cheese I bought, for sandwiches, is actually ‘processed’ cheese. But they’ve packaged it just like real cheese and it’s in with the real cheese display. The “processed”, on the packaging is small and white, on a light background, making it almost unnoticeable!
I won’t fall for that one again!
“Gluten-free” labels on things that don’t contain gluten is not as idiotic as it sounds. Gluten-free mean that it has also not had any cross-contact with gluten containing ingredients as per the FDA.
I could be wrong, but for some reason I thought the FDA was working to ban some of those names (specifically ‘dehydrated cane juice’). If you put sugar in something, you have to call it sugar. Sure, we’re all smart people, but if you bury the name deep enough, it gets difficult. I was at the store with my (health conscious) sister a few months ago and I noticed her looking up and down all the racks. When I asked her what she was looking for she said ‘Agave Nectar’, I told her to check the baking aisle, we found it there, but then when I mentioned to her that it’s nothing more than sugar…basically just HFCS with a different name, she put it down and moved on.
I wouldn’t have a problem with ‘naturally gluten free’, I wouldn’t even have a problem with those people having to have their product certified before getting to use that name, but sometimes the area gets a bit gray when you suggest that your corn chips are better then their corn chips because yours are gluten free. Oddly a local vendor just added ‘Gluten Free’ to their label and a lot of people suddenly hated the “new” chips. They didn’t change anything other than the label. But that’s the way marketing works. I recall a documentary on either Bud or Miller. They put out a commercial for their brand and mentioned that they steam cleaned all their bottles before filling them. The commercial was probably 50 years old, the narrator was saying that everyone steam cleaned their bottles, but the consumer didn’t know that, they only knew that we did, and it worked.
I just flipped through that list and some of them, I don’t want to say are well known, but at least I already knew them and was fully aware, but it bugs me that there’s no cites and the list, while complied by Cracked, is just a bunch of pictures from, so far as I can tell…anyone. Did anyone verify any of that?
I’m not going to go so far as to say call any of it out as being incorrect, but I wouldn’t mind seeing cites for things like Federal rules state that the word ‘light’ should describe a product that has less taste or color.
Also, the other one one that bugged me was the one that says “lightly sweetened will still give you regular diabetes”. Even taking the long way around to say that sugar causes diabetes, their statement is just as bad as what they’re shaming.
And finally, and I think I’ve said this before, the FDA simply cannot regulate every single adjective that people choose to put on their product. If you’re mad that “light” or “hormone free” or “natural” etc don’t mean what you want or you expect them to mean, then it’s on you to read the ingredient and nutrition labels. In general, everything is there, the rest is all marketing and it’s always safe to assume the marketing is there to make you give them your money.
Cracked requires a cite when people submit entries for photoplasties. There’s also edits and comments in the forum as submissions come in.
I’d say it’s sufficiently checked for a casual entertainment web site. The occasional error might slip in.
I made chocolate chip cookies a couple of months ago, and got totally suckered when I bought the chocolate chips. In the middle of the rack of chocolate chips, all with the customary markup for brand names like Hershey’s, there was a significantly cheaper bag of cookie chips from some no-name* brand. It was cheap and the package was smaller than the others, which was perfect for the number of cookies I was looking to bake.
Once I had finished the dough and had the first batch baking, there were some chips left, so I gave them a taste. My first impression was that I really liked them. My second impression was that they were pretty much pure sugar, didn’t taste like normal chocolate and were awful. That’s when I started looking at the package more closely and the implications of them being called “Cookie Chips” began to dawn on me. I checked the ingredients, and sure enough, it contained sugar, cocoa and various other things, but no cocoa butter. Legally speaking, they were not made of chocolate. Of course, they very carefully did not claim to contain chocolate. They just hinted at it very strongly. Bastards.
