After my post last week about the strangely similar nutrition tables for regular Fig Newtons and the new “100% Whole Grain” Fig Newtons, I noticed a lot of traffic coming to my site from something called the Junk Food Blog, who made reference to my post about the Newtons. Thanks for the referral, guys.
Now, you may think that the Junk Food Blog is a site dedicated to informing the unsuspecting masses about the dangers of junk food, right? Wrong! Instead, the site appears to simply point out the various new junk food products available to us in supermarket aisles, nothing more, nothing less. It’s a site without an opinion. Like Switzerland, I suppose. Why bother? Why spend all that time publishing a blog when you have nothing to say? In checking the about page of the site, I did get a laugh out of this description of the blog:
“Look, eating a strict diet of “whole natural foods” might let you live an extra 20 years, but that only means having to eat that crap for another 20 years. Don’t punish yourself!”
Heh. Unfortunately, that’s the only good part of the site, really. I am certainly no expert on food, but I am remotely aware, as evidenced by last week’s Fig Newton comparison, of the misleading nature of food labels today and I bet there’s enough of it going on out there to make an interesting book or documentary.
Anyhoo, just out of sheer curiousity and the fact that I was out sick on Friday, I decided to write an email to Nabisco about the Fig Newton thing. The gist of my email was “why are you offering this product when they’re virtually the same (and arguably worse) than the regular Fig Newtons?” I didn’t really expect a response. I was thinking if I did get a response, it would be one of those horrific auto-reply emails telling me how much they value my opinion and encouraging me to continue visiting their website. A few days later, I did receive a response from a “person” at Nabisco and it went like this:
“It’s important to consider your total diet when making food choices. We believe that balance, variety and moderation are the keys to proper nutrition. We offer a variety of foods with varying contents to meet individual nutritional needs. Thank you for taking the time to express your concerns, I will pass your comments on to our Nutrition department. If you haven’t done so already, please add our site to your favorites and visit us again soon!
I don’t think it occured to whomever copied-and-pasted that templated response that it doesn’t even come close to answering my question, so now they’ve really thrown high-and-inside to me. I’ll be writing back and posting each response from them here until someone at Nabisco answers my question. Good times!