I noticed this US section in a supermarket in Oxford recently. I’ve seen UK sections in French supermarkets, but never US sections in UK supermarkets. UK supermarkets are hardly a paragon of food virtue, but I was amused to remember quite how silly some of the food in US supermarkets is.
I love health claims like this ‘fat free’ one on a product that has 90 calories per unit! There is some evidence that these claims have ‘halo’ effects with busy consumers interpreting ‘fat free’ as healthy.
This retro Pepsi has real sugar in it! Presumably to attract people who don’t like the nasty sweeteners in diet Pepsi or the ‘natural’ sweeteners in Coke Life. How bizarre that we’ve got ourselves to a place that ‘real sugar’ is now a thing to proclaim.
A reminder from the Fuse blog group:
Each Thursday of 2014 we’ll try and post around four pictures on the Fuse blog that capture our weeks in public health research, from the awe-inspiring to the everyday and mundane. Given that more of the latter than the former exists in most of our lives, we foresee problems compiling 208 images worth posting on our own. So this is going to have to be a group project. Send an image (or images) with a sentence or two describing what aspect of your week in public health research they sum up and we’ll post them as soon as we can. You don’t have to send four together – we can mix and match images from different people in the same week.
Normal rules apply: images you made yourself are best; if you use someone else’s image please check you’re allowed to first; if anyone’s identifiable in an image, make sure they’re happy for it to be posted; nothing rude; nothing that breaks research confidentiality etc.
Email your posts to m.welford@tees.ac.uk or contact any member of the Fuse blog group.
The 'throwback' sodas that are being sold in US sections of supermarkets do make me laugh. It's not so much to appeal to people who don't want artificial sweeteners, it's that in the US these types of beverages long ago replaced the sugar with high-fructose corn syrup. In recent years there's been a backlash to the fact that HFCS is in absolutely everything in the US so people are going back to the natural sweeteners. The funny thing is these packs of 'real sugar' soda sold for £8-12 per 12-pack are 'unique' in the US because of the real sugar, but it's just the normal soda you get in the UK since they don't use HFCS.
ReplyDeleteI had seen the Pop Tarts in another shop and thought it was quite funny that they had to block out the health claims. I can't believe they would stand in the US either!