via kottke:

According to the nation’s largest food manufacturers, among the Smart Choices that shoppers can make at the supermarket are Fruit Loops, Fudgsicle bars, Cocoa Krispies, Frosted Flakes, Lucky Charms, I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, and Hellmann’s mayonnaise. Nutritionists are understandably upset.

“These are horrible choices,” said Walter C. Willett, chairman of the nutrition department of the Harvard School of Public Health. He said the criteria used by the Smart Choices Program were seriously flawed, allowing less healthy products, like sweet cereals and heavily salted packaged meals, to win its seal of approval. “It’s a blatant failure of this system and it makes it, I’m afraid, not credible,” Mr. Willett said.

Nutrition professor Marion Nestle added:

The object of this is to make highly processed foods appear as healthful as unprocessed foods, which they are not.

Since the healthcare industry is spending $1.4 million on lobbying per day in Washington, this is what happens to well-intentioned “reform.”

I’m all for reform to make citizens’ happy. I am 110% opposed to drafting legislation to fill the pockets of the real customer of healthcare– the insurance companies.

This “Smart Choices” story is just a prelude to a successful lobbying effort by the healthcare industry.

Big food companies hilariously attempt to regulate themselves