Fruit Snacks - The Great Hipocrasy

Fruit snacks are a really good example of a strong marketing concept. The goals of a marketing concept are 1) knowing the needs and wants of your target market, 2)  and delivering the desired satisfactions. Note the operative word desired.  Lets apply this concept to 'Fruit Snacks.'

The target market for this product is two fold. The primary target is children, typically the actual consumer of fruit snacks. The secondary target is the group of people with the buying power, the parents.
Regarding the food industry, the needs and wants of children are sweets and familiarity, while the needs and wants for parents are healthy, convenient and inexpensive foods.

To effectively satisfy this group, the manufacturers of fruit snacks, and many other 'kid tested, mom approved' products, have created a tasty food product with a healthy image. Kids love the sweet taste and the familiar character shapes and packaging, while parents love that their children are eating something with a 'healthful' advantage that happens to be very convenient (no washing, cutting, or rotting), and relatively inexpensive.

Sounds like a win-win right? Let's explore the supposed 'healthful' advantage of these handy little snacks. Some parents would be shocked and disappointed to learn that typically the first or second ingredient is High Fructose Corn Syrup, Corn Syrup, or some other chemically created sweetener.  Others may not understand why this is a problem, so I digress.

Chemical sweeteners are more readily absorbed into the body when consumed, requiring less metabolic energy from the consumer, leading to an upset of the natural blood sugar balance. In my humble opinion, this easy absorption of chemical sweeteners would ultimately 'confuse' the pancreas, the insulin producing organ, because the normal metabolic breakdown that occurs with regular cane sugar is not taking place; which could quite possibly explain the diabetes and/or obesity epidemics.

Returning to my original topic, 'fruit snacks', I will point out the the ingredients following the chemical sweetener is usually some form of  gelatin, fruit juice and several artificial colors. Like corn syrup, gelatin is unnatural, and otherwise disgusting. As Wikipedia explains it: "Gelatin is a protein produced by partial hydrolysis of collagen extracted from the boiled bones, connective tissues, organs and some intestines of animals such as domesticated pigs, cattle, and horses."
 




Next, fruit juice, which sounds healthy, and is the most beneficial ingredient in this food product, however, as Michael Pollan states in Food Rules, "in nature, sugars almost always come packaged with fiber, which slows their absorption and gives you a sense of satiety before you've ingested too many calories." When they are processed, though, the fiber and other nutrients are stripped away and the juice becomes little more than sweet tasting empty calories that don't fill you up and are much more fattening.

Finally, the last 'healthful' ingredient in fruit snacks, artificial colors. Simply stated, humans should not ingest artificial anything - it's unnatural, and our bodies weren't designed to process man made ingredients. But, here are a few of the consequences that come with consumption of food colors, just for grins.

• The majority of food colors are made with petroleum.
• They are a derivative of petrochemicals and coal tar.
• Food dye is pulled off the market regularly.
• Yellow #2 specifically has been proven to cause ADHD, many forms of cancer, male sterility, and more.
• There have been petitions to ban these dyes, but they are still on the market.
• Artificial food colorings have been banned in the U.K. and parts of Europe.

~Science News, Kevin Trudeau

Because I am a busy mother of 3, I know that you can't always serve fresh fruit, but you can make a choice not to serve harmful, imitation fruit in its place.  Should you happen to have a short, fruit snack addict in your home, I recommend weaning them to Annie's Organic Bunny Fruit Snacks, which can be found at Target stores nationwide, as well as in bulk at Amazon.com.

Real Sugar requires more energy to absorb, HFCS loses again...

Many people are interested in 'getting healthy', or 'watching what they eat'. Which are great motives. However, one of the basics of being healthier is being conscious of what you are putting into your body, right down to the last ingredient on every label. There is a movement in the food industry, toward more natural and less processed foods, which, in my opinion, is a great way to get, and stay healthy. This movement begins and ends with people paying attention to what they are buying, and demanding better quality.

High Fructose Corn Syrup has long been controversial, but the bottom line is that it is unnatural. It's processed, and it's in everything.

A Little History: According to the American Chemical Society, high-fructose corn syrup entered the industrial market in the 1970s. Two researchers, Richard Marshall and Earl Kooi, developed the manufacturing process in 1957, discovering that they could alter glucose's molecular composition to make fructose. Later, in the mid-1960s and early 1970s, Japanese scientist Yoshiyuki Takasaki and Osamu Tanabe further developed and improved the manufacturing process. By the mid-1970s, corn syrup had begun to replace sugar as a sweetener in many products. Partly because of the federal government's corn subsidies, it became cheaper to make, and its prominence grew.

Chemical Make-Up: High-fructose corn syrup, the most prominent type of commercial corn syrup, originally comes from cornstarch. Two enzymes, alpha-amylase and gluco-amylase, break down the starch to make glucose. A third enzyme, glucose-isomerase, turns the glucose into a mixture that includes fructose. The resulting syrup has a honey like thickness and is usually 55 percent fructose and 45 percent glucose.

The very fact that this common product was created by researchers is proof that it is unnatural. There are no corn syrup farms, you cannot go out and harvest corn syrup from a corn tree as you would get pure maple syrup from a maple tree.

Psychology Professor Bart Hoebel tells News at Princeton:

It appears that in HFCS, fructose molecules are "free and unbound, ready for absorption and utilization. In contrast, every fructose molecule in sucrose that comes from cane sugar or beet sugar is bound to a corresponding glucose molecule and must go through an extra metabolic step before it can be utilized. " It may well take more energy to consume real sugar than it does to consume HFCS.

So, HFCS is more readily absorbed than plain white sugar. Our bodies have to work harder to breakdown sugar, than corn syrup. It seems that there could be a direct correlation to the overuse of HFCS in the majority of processed products to the increasing diabetes epidemic in our country, and some people are starting to catch on.

Check out this article about some major brands steering clear of corn syrup, and why:
http://industry.bnet.com/food/10001771/the-death-of-high-fructose-corn-syrup/

I challenge you to read the label of everything in your pantry, or at least a few things, and see what you've been eating, what you've been feeding your family. And to steer clear of corn syrup, in all forms, not only because it's more metabolically accessible to your body, but because it's found in a lot of products that sugar isn't, and never should be.