Cheerios: An “Untested New Drug”
I found this letter from the US Food and Drug Administration to General Mills interesting. It appears on the surface that the agency is trying to protect the American public from ungrounded persuasion, yet I can’t find anything in the letter claiming that GM has made an unsupported statement.
Does anyone understand this better than I do?
This is a beautiful example of politics at work.
Cheerios claims on its box that it can “lower your cholesterol four percent in six weeks”. This is false. It is based on a “study” sponsored by General Mills where subjects took more than half their daily calories from Cheerios (apparently they ate nothing but Cheerios for two of their three daily meals). No one eating Cheerios in anything resembling a normal way would get close to this effect; therefore, it is false and misleading advertising. If General Mills wants to market Cheerios as a drug, it needs to meet the normal standards for drug evidence, and it doesn’t.
So far, so good. Either you approve of the FDA’s decision and think it’s important to hold cereal companies to a high level of accuracy, or you think they should relax their standards and allow more leeway to food advertisers. Either one would be a legitimate response. But look at what happens:
A few sources correctly title the story, eg “Cheerios Aren’t A Drug, FDA Says”. The majority choose to go the other way and title it something more inflammatory like “Popular Cereal Is A Drug, US Food Watchdog Says”, which is of course the opposite of what it said. It’s the inflammatory outrageous headlines that get put on blogs and Reddit (now reworded further to “WTF? FDA says Cheerios are a drug”)
Then all the usual suspects take the mistitled blown-out-of-proportion story and look to see whether or not this supports their preferred political narrative. For example:
Independent Institute (a libertarian think tank):
Freedom News Blitz (“The News Freedom Lovers Devour”):
So yes, we went from “please don’t use poorly designed made-up studies to make spurious medical claims” to “hard work is unpalatable to the vast majority of people” in two steps. Remarkable, ne?
And then the media goes into one of its periodic vicious feedback loops and started reporting on the reporting, adding a little more liberal bent at each pass. From Reuters, here’s Cheerios, Cereal of Liberty. The article starts with “Disputes over food-label claims are always political” and quickly moves onto “But the current, insane iteration of the American right has walked several steps past the crazy line...For them, wholesome, “American” foods are a-OK. Eurocommie foods are right out.”
Three steps and now we’re at “Eurocommie.”
In the last phase of the decline from “reasonable question about cholesterol lowering properties of cereal” to “complete proof humankind as a species is doomed”, someone opens the floodgates to Mordor and a horde of semi-human blog commenters swarm out, ready to add their “opinion” to the “discussion”. From here and here:
Four steps from “Don’t lie about cholesterol on your cereal box, please,” to “Obama will kill everyone who disagrees with him.”
With all due credit to MBlume for raising the topic, I wish Yvain’s comment here had been a top-level post. This is an excellent demonstration of the progression of the mind-killer effect.
agreed
off-topic, but good use of ‘ne’. I applaud this.
I wonder why most of these links are dead now. I thought the internet was more robust than that.
An upvote doesn’t feel sufficient to reward your awesomeness. Standing applause.
You guys must be having fun living in the USA. Such disparities.
Mark Kleiman, a blogger on public affairs, says:
I’ve bolded what appears to be the crucial bit.
True enough, but not very specific. It would seem to be trying to dissuade people from making specific medical claims about products without providing strong and scientifically-rigorous support.
As that’s the intended function of the FDA, and a valuable one, I’d have to approve their action.
This is reminding me of someone who argued against medical marijuana because “smoke isn’t a drug”. As argument from an irrelevant definition a named fallacy?
I don’t thing this case is really their bread and butter, but on the FDA see FDA Review.
If it seems like a senseless act, government act, its probably about bureacratic turf in some manner.
If I had to guess, it increases the FDA’s regulatory muscle, since they can control drugs more carefully than foods.
Hmm, that doesn’t seem like rent-seeking behavior though—all these folks are still going to have stable jobs whether cheerios are a drug or not. Is it purely instinctive for humans to strive to increase their regulatory muscle whenever possible? Or do people with this trait simply get selected for in politics?
They still will have jobs, certainly, but since their bureau probably gets funding based on how much work they do, they have to seem busy. Even if the work is penalizing a firm for making a (presumably) true claim. Since the Cheerios promotion violated some rule, they have a technically valid excuse.
Of course, the cost to the person who issued the letter was close to zero, so why not be a stickler?
Added: The point of keeping high funding is to grow one’s number of inferiors, which is evidence of social dominence.