See the post above yours. You brought the snark, I responded in kind.
I just watched a few commercials, and it doesn’t seem to me to be any more misleading than your average sugar-loaded cereal commercial. Anytime I hear anything like “part of a healthy breakfast,” or some advertising BS like that, I assume the worst.
Yes, indeed, it does.
Nasssty balanced breakfastses. We hates them, we do.
Like this commercial. All it’s saying to me is that the kids will eat it and, really, that’s about it. It has hazelnuts, skim milk, and cocoa. (And mounds of sugar.) But, maybe it’s just because I’m particularly cynical, but I do note that no health claims are made. That particular commercial doesn’t even have anything saying “part of a healthy, nutritious breakfast” line in it. Just “breakfast never tasted so good.”
I think that many “anti” posts seem to be criticising the product, rather than the advertising, which may be throwing some people. I’ll admit I’m surprised that the generally cynical, worldly-wise SDMB has posters who could be quite so shocked (shocked, I say!) at the sugar content of a chocolate spread, or that its advertising might not make a prominent feature of it.
I’m 50 (a year older than Nutella, it turns out) and I’m pretty sure that in the specific areas of nutritional information and education, and the advertising of breakfast foods in particular, things used to be considerably more shit than they are in these new-fangled times.
Oddly, one of things I remember from my long-ago childhood is old issues of Mad magazine (from before I was born) mocking the marketing of sugary crap as healthy breakfast food. It was a transparent ploy in the 50s – are people still falling for it?
Sorry. No one can remotely confuse peanut butter and Nutella, it’s like confusing Ricotta and Gouda.
Nobody can even imagine it’s a health-conscious thing.
It’s delicious as hell.
I wonder why the ad copy talks about the ingredients as including, “the combination of roasted hazelnuts, skim milk and a hint of cocoa.” Cocoa comes before the skim milk in the ingredients list, so if there’s just a hint of cocoa, there must be only the faintest suggestion of milk. And the nutrition panel indicates that the stuff has virtually no vitamins in it.
I have to admit, the “hint of cocoa” I did :dubious: at, but at the same time, I’m shocked that hazelnuts are above cocoa in the ingredients list. I would have bet my life that it was mostly chocolate/cocoa with hazelnut flavor. I’ve been having Nutella for almost 20 years now, and I would describe it as a chocolate spread with hazelnuts, not a hazelnut spread with chocolate, yet it seems hazelnuts are more prominent than cocoa. (ETA: But, if you count the sugar, palm oil, cocoa, and milk as part of the “chocolate spread,” then my description would be right.)
Wait is it on the shelf near the “healthy” peanut butter (where the marshmallow creme used to be), or is it on the healthy breakfast shelf next to the–what the fuck? Did you say Pop Tarts? Listen, maybe you should sit down. I’ve got some bad news.
So? A flavor is not a color or a preservative.
It’s not like natural vs artificial is a particularly cromulant argument anyway. There are plenty of natural things that can kill you and plenty of artificial things that can be beneficial.
The buttload of sugar in the stuff while they act like it’s healthfood in the commericals, yeah, there you’ve got a good point.
That’s almost verbatim what I was going to say. The stuff is way, way too sweet and greasy to mistake for something healthy.
I ended up with a bad case of thrush after consuming at least two spoon fulls of Nutella daily for 3 weeks in my first trimester, because the high sugar content threw off the balance of naturally occurring yeast in my mouth and my comprised immune system from being pregnant and on antibiotics for a week couldn’t bring it back into balance naturally. I am now turned off Nutella forever. 
x 1000
What’s next? Complaining that beer ads don’t mention “it’s mostly water, folks”?
No, I think everyone pretty much knows what’s in beer, and the beer manufacturers aren’t encouraging us to think that it’s something else.
More analogous would be creating some kind of soft drink that’s mostly water and sugar and marketing it as “a beer beverage in the great tradition of craft brewing”.
I don’t think you get analogies.
I always steal Nutella packets from the Delta SkyClubs when I’m traveling and bring them home for the kids (don’t rat me out!). I freely admit that I assumed it was a chocolate-y nut butter and not 100% unhealthy. This thread has been educational, no more stolen Nutella for the kiddos!
Well, at least it has sugar and palm oil instead of high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated soybean oil.
I tried it once, waaay too sweet for my palate.
Don’t worry, considering the cost of the ingredients they actually make the stuff out of as opposed to the ingredients you thought you were getting, you probably don’t owe them more than about a dollar for your depredations all told.
Thanks, I probably should have mentioned that the little packets are free, they just discourage you from leaving with them with little signs that mention that they should be consumed within the club.
Now I know why the rugrats are so happy when I bring them home, it’s a packet of frosting!
I find it just a little bit ironic that, while Americans in general seem to be wary of the nanny state and put great value in individual responsibility, many people in this thread (supposedly also Americans) are not presuming their fellow citizens to be smart enough to recognize that Nutella is NOT health food. (But then again, this is the country that brought you: “Caution: Bevearage may be hot”.) I believe the line about making a balanced breakfast taste good nails it - they don’t say they make the breakfast balanced, quite the opposite.
Great, now I’m hungry for a Nutella sandwich.