FDA: Cheerios is claiming to be a drug

This news is astounding: The FDA, which for many years has worked hard to serve as a lapdog for its industry masters (not the taxpayers), has recently woken up and taken a real stand. The FDA has charged that Cheerios is "misbranded" as a drug that prevents and treats high cholesterol and heart disease. Caveat: The FDA warning letter doesn't cover all of the health claims on boxes of Cheerios. Here's an excerpt from the FDA warning letter to General Mills:

Based on claims made on your product's label, we have determined that your Cheerios® Toasted Whole Grain Oat Cereal is promoted for conditions that cause it to be a drug because the product is intended for use in the prevention, mitigation, and treatment of disease. Specifically, your Cheerios® product bears the following claims on its label:

• "you can Lower Your Cholesterol 4% in 6 weeks" " • "Did you know that in just 6 weeks Cheerios can reduce bad cholesterol by an average of 4 percent? Cheerios is ... clinically proven to lower cholesterol. A clinical study showed that eating two 1 1/2 cup servings daily of Cheerios cereal reduced bad cholesterol when eaten as part of a diet low in saturated fat and cholesterol."

These claims indicate that Cheerios® is intended for use in lowering cholesterol, and therefore in preventing, mitigating, and treating the disease hypercholesterolemia. Additionally, the claims indicate that Cheerios® is intended for use in the treatment, mitigation, and prevention of coronary heart disease through, lowering total and "bad" (LDL) cholesterol. Elevated levels of total and LDL cholesterol are a risk factor for coronary heart disease and can be a sign of coronary heart disease. Because of these intended uses, the product is a drug within the meaning of section 201(g)(1)(B) of the Act [21 U.S.C. § 321 (g)P)(B)].

I applaud the FDA's actions. Many food products are covered with comparable health claims, yet (until now) the claims have not been scrutinized by anyone other than the manufacturers. I suspect that a huge percentage of these claims would not hold up to an independent scientific review. I also suspect that many consumers make their food purchase choices based on these sorts of claims, many of them unsubstantiated. To the extent that a manufacturer gets a competitive leg up by making an unsubstantiated claim, this is an unfair practice that hurts manufacturers who are not stretching the truth. Now, the FDA will take a look at these claims of General Mills, and hopefully thousands of other food manufacturers, and we'll then see how many of those now-ubiquitous health claims start disappearing from products on the shelves. Too bad there's not an organized produce and grain industries that spends big money plastering signs all over produce departments (and billboards) telling people how good it is to eat fruits, vegetables and whole grains, and also telling consumers that there is no need to buy expensive processed food in wasteful packaging to be healthy. There's so many health claims stamped onto food products that walking down the grocery aisle makes me think I'm at a NASCAR event. I'm not trying to blast the makers of Cheerios here. My kids eat it--sometimes I do too. Perhaps these claims on the Cheerios boxes are justified. But let us investigate. Let us really find out before we allow the grocery aisle health claim wars to continue.

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Matt Taibbi goes to war against Goldman Sachs

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi is one of my heroes. I've often recommended his investigative pieces at DI. Taibbi's latest Rolling Stone article is an all-out attack on Goldman Sachs as the culprit behind the bubbles and busts. No, they don't "just happen." [Note: the full article is here]. No, Goldman Sachs isn't the only culpable entity, but Goldman serves well as a deserving target for the kinds of criminal abuses that have destabilized the U.S. economy and crushed the savings of so many people. Here's one example of many by Taibbi, this one explaining how it was that so many shitty mortgages were approved by lenders across the United States. Step One for this problem (as it is for so many other problems with the economy) is to eliminate sane standards for evaluating the economic worth of commodities, individuals and entities. The first step has the intentional function of destroying the possibility of honest valuation, thereby setting the stage for confusing and misleading investors:

Goldman's role in the sweeping global disaster that was the housing bubble is not hard to trace. Here again, the basic trick was a decline in underwriting standards, although in this case the standards weren't in IPOs but in mortgages. By now almost everyone knows that for decades mortgage dealers insisted that home buyers be able to produce a down payment of 10 percent or more, show a steady income and good credit rating, and possess a real first and last name. Then, at the dawn of the new millennium, they suddenly threw all that shit out the window and started writing mortgages on the backs of napkins to cocktail waitresses and ex-cons carrying five bucks and a Snickers bar.

Beware, that if you watch the videos of Taibbi explaining this blatant robbery of investors and taxpayer, as well as the Democrat complicity with this mess, you will seethe. You will feel betrayed.

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Scientology 101

I attended an Anonymous rally last Saturday. You know, Anonymous—the international internet-linked underground that protests Scientology. Anonymous sprang up on imageboards—notably Futaba and the infamous 4chan—in 2006. Project Chanology, the organized, ongoing protest against the Church of Scientology, began in 2008 with a press release and a famous YouTube video, and has since taken on a life of its own. Scientology, as DI readers probably already know, is a scam masquerading as a sort of religion/self-actualization movement hybrid. The Church of Scientology (CoS) was dreamed up by a guy named L. Ron Hubbard, who used to write a lot of pulp fiction. In 1950, Hubbard published a book called Dianetics, in which he claimed that neuroses and other problems are caused by engrams. Engrams are like little negative scripts that get encoded into the unconscious mind (Hubbard called it the “reactive mind”). These engrams take root, supposedly, because when we’re unconscious, the reactive mind hears whatever’s being said around us, and takes it literally. Even fetuses get engrams--from the moment of conception, they can hear everything that's being said in their mother's vicinity, and their little reactive minds are busy recording engrams which, without Dianetic treatment, will cause all manner of psychological trouble throughout their lives. I’m not making this up. L. Ron Hubbard made this up. And, sadly, he got some people to believe it. Enough people, in fact, that he was able to morph Dianetics from a mere self-help fad into a new "religion"--the Church of Scientology.

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Backhanded celebration of homeopathy

It's homeopathic awareness week! Neurologica wants to take full advantage:

According to the British Homeopathic Association . . . June 14-21 is Homeopathy Awareness Week. I would like to do my part to increase awareness of homeopathy. . . I am all in favor of homeopathic awareness. The scientific community should use this week to make the public acutely aware of the fact that homeopathy is, put simply, utter rubbish. Neurologica has put together a detailed account of the world's most over-embellished version of the placebo effect. Consider the homeopathic advocates' arguments for why homeopathic drugs can't be tested:

Many homeopaths have argued that homeopathy cannot be subjected to the same type of studies as are conventional drugs. This is because each patient, from a homeopathic perspective, is unique, and cannot be lumped into a single category. Whereas conventional medicine can compare treatments of 1000 diabetics with two different medications, homeopaths cannot produce large numbers of patients with the same totality of illness requiring the exact same treatment. In making this argument, that of untestability, such homeopaths are securing their position in the halls of pseudoscience, for if their is one single quality which separates scientific theories from nonscientific ones, it is falsifiability. If homeopathic remedies cannot be tested, then they can never be grounded in science.

Neurologica's article is well written and well documented. I agree entirely.

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Now you can pay for the convenience of water!

This is now the second time in a few months that I've gotten the following piece of junk mail: This letter is advertising a promotion in which, for thirty-two dollars a month and up, I can pay to have bottled water delivered to my door. What a brilliant idea! How could you beat that for convenience? Oh, that's right . . . Instead of paying for Poland Spring water at the rate of about $1.64 per gallon, I could get clean, fresh, drinkable water of any temperature I please straight from the tap in my kitchen. I don't know exactly how much this costs me, but I can say with complete confidence that it's a lot less than a dollar per gallon. Clearly, Poland Spring doesn't want you to think too hard about the economics of this. However, for the environmentally conscious consumer, this mailing also has a page touting their green credentials: Bottled Water Junk Mail Recycling 900,000 bottles and keeping 1.8 million pounds of plastic out of landfills is certainly very impressive. But, the skeptic in me has to ask, wouldn't it be much better for people to just use their perfectly good existing public infrastructure for drinking water, and not have to manufacture all that plastic in the first place? The bottled-water industry is one of the great triumphs of modern marketing: creating demand for a product for which there's absolutely no genuine need, selling at exorbitant cost a substance which any person in the Western world can obtain virtually for free. Even more absurd, despite its imagery of glaciers and mountain springs, most bottled water comes from municipal sources - i.e., the same water you get from your tap anyway. What bottled water really represents is almost pure profit for the beverage conglomerates that sell it, and unnecessary environmental harm caused by the expenditure of fossil fuels needed to manufacture, pack and ship it (not to mention sending out all this junk mail touting it). It's no healthier than the water that comes from the tap in your house. It doesn't even taste better. What on earth could convince a person to pay money for a scheme as ridiculous as this?

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