I loathe advertising and I grew up in a time when we were subjected to it in a very different way than we are today. Back before the internet was everything, producers of products got away with a lot of claims about products and foodstuffs and they still do to this day but since we can all investigate these claims with the click of a mouse, it is less harmful today than 2 decades ago.
I recall this particular advertisement made by Frosted Mini Wheats because it was on TV all the time, it was advertised on the trains that I use and it was on billboards all over the city I live in. Kellogg's mad the claim that they had done a scientific study that children that ate their cereal before going to school were up to 20% more alert because of Frosted Mini Wheats and for a lot of people, this was a very eye-opening statistic to present.
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This was back in the days when commercials were on TV for 30 seconds at a time and it seemed like almost every commercial that was making some sort of health claims had some small print that would pop up at the bottom of the screen that served as sort of a disclaimer of sorts or described how they came to this conclusion. The advertisers would make certain that there was something going on in the advertisement when this text popped up to minimize the chance that people would actually see it though.
Kellogg's actually DID do a scientific study to come to this conclusion but what the didn't tell the public was how it was that they came to this result. Measuring "alertness" isn't exactly something that can be quantified very easily anyway so there was a problem there to begin with - but this isn't where they were really bending the rules as far as their claims were concerned.
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It was later revealed that in their study that Kellogg's doctored the results dramatically to make this claim and the obvious part of their wording is the fact that they said "up to 20% increase." As it turns out, most of the kids in the study didn't show any increase in attention and only a couple of them saw this increase. This is not how science is done. But wait! It gets worse!
The "control" group that Kellogg's used as the kids who didn't have attention increases not only didn't get any Kellogg's Frosted Mini Wheats for breakfast, they were not given any food at all. The control group of children were given only water before going into the trials and how this didn't end up being some sort of child abuse lawsuit is just amazing to me.
This didn't happen in the 80's though. This was back in 2007 and 2008 but still it was found that over 50% of adults actually believed the advertising, without even looking into the details. As a result, sales of Frosted Mini Wheats skyrocketed because parents wanted to give their kids an edge in their education. I've had Frosted Mini Wheats before, they are NOT good and certainly not something that I would have wanted to eat as a child - or even now.
Kellogg's would later be sued and settled the class action lawsuit for $4 million. This was a mere slap on the wrist for the gigantic company and certainly not enough punishment to ensure that they don't do it again.
The point here is that we all need to be very vigilant when some product starts making health claims because there is a very good chance that what they are saying isn't true at all or even if there is some truth to their claims it was likely an internal study that they funded and of course in this situation they are going to rig the results as much as they can in their favor.
When I look at the amount of products that are available in the supplement and food industry and all the claims that these companies make it kind of boggles the mind, maybe up to 20% boggling.
Whenever a company makes some sort of outlandish claim, be very apprehensive to believe it because as history shows, there is a very good chance that it is a bunch of BS. There is no substitute for a balanced diet mixed with exercise and there likely never will be. It most certainly is not going to come from a bowl of sugar-coated carbs.
I am not a trainer nor do I have any educational certificates to support my words. All I know is that I investigate products before buying into them and with my own life I lost over 50 lbs in my 40's and kept it off. There are no shortcuts... you gotta put in the work