Cheerios, Lies and the American Way

My Cheerios box says, "Every Box Can Help a Heart," which I do not take too literally, thinking the box can somehow help my heart, but what Cheerios meant to say is what is inside, namely the Cheerios cereal itself can help your heart, presumably by lowering your cholesterol, a claim I recall from previous Cheerios boxes and this box does say, "Free Cholesterol Screenings," so I guess Cheerios is still tying itself to happy cholesterol tydings.

Examing the box, looking for the reference to the medical journal with the article which showed the beneficial effects of Cheerios in lowering the blood cholesterol in human beings, I could find no such reference.  Not to be deterred, this being the 21st century, I popped on the internet and keyed in "Evidence Cheerios lowers cholesterol" and found nothing except a series of articles about the FDA reprimanding General Mills for making false claims about the cereal's ability to lower cholesterol, which, by the way is not exactly the same as preventing heart disease, but it's a step in the right direction, provided it lowers the LDL cholesterol, not the HDL, which is to say, we'd like to know Cheerio's is lowering the right cholesterol.

Presumably, somebody did some study Cheerios can hang its hat on, although for reasons I'm about to explain, it would be a huge surprise if Cheerios lowered blood cholesterol in any clinically significant way.

The reason dates back to Dennis Burkitt's original observations that in West Africa, where people in the bush eat a very high fiber diet, so high it makes their stools into cow pies, there is very little coronary artery disease and presumably, the natives have lower blood cholesterols. (He did not measure the natives' cholesterols--but he speculated, a wild guess he said, that maybe the fiber accelerated the movement of gut contents through the gut enough that the gut didn't have enough contact time with the cholesterol in the diet to actually be able to get the cholesterol out of the food and into the blood. Increased transit time, he called it, might result in decrease absorptive time. ) But the dietary fiber had to be high enough to change the stools, into cow pies and to increase the transit time of food through the gut. Cheerios does not do this. Kellogs Original All Bran, can do this, and it's the only cereal on the shelves of the American supermarket I'm aware of which can do this.  Presumably, General Mills does not want this getting out, that Kellogs has the better fiber cereal, the only fiber cereal actually, but Cheerios started it with the false claims. (Personally, I mix the two. All Bran is like eating cardboard. Cheerios are fun. Cheerios are fun, tasty but not any better for your health than celery, maybe less.)

But taking a conjecture and turning it into a marketing campaign is what American industry advertising  is all about. American politics, ditto.

It is a free country; there is a First Ammendment guaranteeing free speech.

But you can't cry fire in a crowded theater, and there are or ought to be limits on free speech.

The question is, can commercial speech, i.e. advertising, be held to a higher standard?

If you are making money from what you say, is it not reasonable to require you have to provide evidence of its truth, when challenged?

As for the reasoning behind fiber as a potential healthy thing, I'm attaching below a copy of a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, which provides a little fleshing out for anyone interested.

Correspondence


Dietary Fiber and Colorectal Cancer

N Engl J Med 1999; 340:1924-1926June 17, 1999

Article

To the Editor:

The fundamental flaw in the article by Fuchs et al. (Jan. 21 issue)1 concerns the definition of what constitutes a high-fiber diet. I was lucky enough to attend one of Dr. Denis Burkitt's lectures in London in 1972 and vividly remember how he defined a high-fiber diet. It had nothing at all to do with the calculations of Southgate et al.2 or any other calculation; whether a diet was considered to be high in fiber depended on the effect the diet had on the stool.

Burkitt began his lecture with a slide showing a stool of a typical Western, “civilized” person, a sausage-shaped thing, familiar to most of us, in a toilet bowl. His next slide was of a stool of a typical rural West African, which looked like a flat cow pie. Burkitt postulated that the West African's stool moved more quickly through the colon, giving carcinogens contained on its surface less time to be in contact with the mucosa — thus less time to induce carcinogenesis.

During the question-and-answer period, many questions from the audience concerned how one determined whether or not a diet was high in fiber in the sense Burkitt meant. Burkitt shook his head at all the salads, cereals, and breads offered as sources of fiber. He showed a slide of the staple cereal eaten by West Africans, which looked, in its wooden bowl, not too different from the stool that came out the other end. The only thing the study by Fuchs et al. proves is what anyone who heard Burkitt's lecture already knew: the American public has been sold a sugar-coated misconception.