Greenwashing Alert
Junk food companies know healthy food is in demand. The solution? Change the marketing!

Huge corporations, including grocery store chains, fast food restaurants, processed-food manufacturers, television networks and marketing agencies conspire with their vast resources (food and beverage manufacturers spend about $12 billion per year on marketing) to create powerful messages that shape our perceptions. These campaigns have just one goal: To maximize demand for their products to increase profitability, even if it comes at the expense of our health.

Greenwashing is a marketing tactic used by food and nonfood retailers, restaurant and manufacturers to sell junk food or environmentally unfriendly products with the use of the imagery of healthiness or environmental friendliness.

I see greenwashing everywhere. And unsuspecting consumers fall victims of this shameful and unscrupulous marketing practice constantly. Even the most inconspicuous places sell junk food, which consumers buy because they think it's healthy.

Expect to find greenwashing in conventional grocery stores and restaurants -- and lots more of it in the near future. More surprising, however, is that you'll find plenty of it at the local health food store, too.

On a recent car trip from Southern to Northern California, my husband and I wanted a healthy lunch and decided to stop at the New Frontiers grocery store in San Luis Obispo. New Frontiers is a standard "health food store," which has a convenience food section where it sells freshly prepared “healthy” foods and homemade pastries that one, naturally, assumes are healthy. To my disappointment, this was just another example of greenwashing.

The New Frontiers market had a menu for made-to-order sandwiches, which not only lacked creativity but also healthfulness. Their meat, vegetarian and vegan sandwiches were made with the typical ingredients that make healthy food so cliché, boring and off-putting, such as mayonnaise, bean sprouts and carrots. The former is not healthy and the latter generally unappetizing.

To my delight, however, the freshly-baked and mouth-watering pastries and scones displayed in the enclosed shelves looked promising. And even though I have a personal policy about baking my own desserts when I want to eat something sweet, I do make exceptions sometimes when I travel and will buy something if it’s healthy. The organic vegan peach blackberry scones looked simply delicious and were made with organic whole grain flour and real fruit; something I really appreciated.

As I read the list of ingredients on a sign, however; I realized that one of the main ingredients was soy margarine -- undoubtedly, this required further investigation.

When I asked the clerk if the vegan scones contained trans fats [http://www.vegetarianorganiclife.com/9.htm] -- one of the most toxic and unhealthy ingredients you can find in the worst junk food -- she looked puzzled and didn’t understand what I meant. I explained to her that their vegan scones listed soy margarine as an ingredient, and that I wanted to know what kind of soy margarine was used to make the scones. She said she would find out and disappeared for about three minutes. When she returned, she told me that the margarine used in the baked goods was made with partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. Of course, that clearly indicated that the scones were loaded with trans fats -- I didn't buy one.

There is something fundamentally wrong with health food stores selling food made with harmful ingredients like trans fats. Even junk food giants like Starbucks, McDonalds and the people who make Girl Scout Cookies -- even the entire city of New York -- are moving away from trans fats. Yet some health food stores are adding trans-fats to their home-baked, vegan foods, and their employees don't know about the trans fats issue.

Shoppers go out of their way to avoid conventional bakeries and other sources of unhealthy baked goods (such as Starbucks), and enter the health food store believing that they'll probably pay more, and will get foods that taste worse. But they do it because they trust the store to offer healthy food. Then, to find the vegan products, people are demonstrating even more of a commitment to health. For the store to slip a well known toxin like trans fats is simply unforgivable.


Watch Out for "Nutraceutical" Beverages

The Coca Cola company -- the world's leading maker of flavored sugar-water -- and cosmetics giant L'Oreal, are reportedly working on a new beverage called Lumaé, which they will sell as a soft drink (possibly under a different, currently unannounced name) that promotes healthy skin via some yet-undisclosed ingredient. The beverage may be sold in department stores, rather than convenience and grocery outlets. Both soft drink and cosmetics companies in general want to cash in on what they see as a coming boom in "nutraceutical" beverages. My view: If you want healthy looking skin, then be healthy all over, inside and out. And that means eating a healthy diet -- and drinking plenty of water.

And in keeping with the same theme, Coca-Cola and PepsiCo have reached new levels of absurdity in a new, misleading greenwashing campaign to sell their liquid candy as healthy. Pepsi and Coke have come up with new diet sodas, "Tava" and "Diet Coke Plus," which are fortified with vitamins and minerals and will be sold as healthy "sparkling beverages."

Coke and Pepsi realize that people accurately associate soda with poor health and obesity. And that's hurting them. Their sales declined in 2005 for the first time in years. Carbonated sugar water is still a good money-making industry, a $68 billion market. But Coke and Pepsi don't want to lose the significant profit margins they make by selling you liquid candy and diet sodas laden with harmful high fructose corn syrup and artificial chemical sweeteners. Natural beverages made with sparkling water sweetened and flavored with real fruit juices are not only more difficult to manufacture and handle, but also not as profitable.

Brace yourself, because this is just the beginning. As people become increasingly knowledgeable about health and its link to foods and beverages, they'll increasingly turn away from products associated with poor health. So the junk food companies like Coca-Cola and PepsiCo will transform the branding and marketing of their products, to cash in on growing health awareness, without actually going to the expense of making and selling healthy beverages. That's why it's important to never assume something is healthy -- even if it's found in the health food store, and is sold as a healthy product. Don't be fooled by the words "natural" or "health." Those are just words, and not worth the paper they're printed on.


How to Beat Greenwashing

Now that many people seeking out healthy food instead of junk food, it comes as a shock to some that the food sold as healthy is junk food, too. Some despair that they'll never be able to eat a healthy diet when companies make it so hard.

But there's a simple solution. The only way to make sure you don't eat nasty toxic foods is to always find out what the ingredients are.

Marketing is designed to make you think a certain way about a product, and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with what you'll be putting in your body.

But it is the ingredients what you're buying, not the marketing.

If you compare as an extreme case, for example, the difference between maple syrup and Aunt Jemima syrup, you'll note that from a marketing perspective, they're fundamentally identical. Both emphasize a dark brown sweet liquid for pancakes that tastes like boiled down sap from maple trees. But from an ingredient perspective -- and from your body's perspective -- the two foods have nothing in common. Aunt Jemima syrup is sugar from corn, thickeners, coloring, preservatives and artificial flavor. Maple trees are not involved.

If you're about to buy something in the grocery store, read the list of ingredients. If you're in a restaurant or other place where ingredients are unavailable -- ask.

Educate yourself about what's healthy and what isn't. In addition to protecting yourself and your family from bad food, asking about ingredients -- then rejecting foods that turn out to be unhealthy -- also adds the benefit of educating the people who serve foods, and applying consumer pressure on companies to improve their fare.

Companies that use greenwashing rely on ignorance, passivity and apathy on the consumer’s part. That's the business model. Make something cheaply, and tell 'em it's healthy.

Here is what you can do to protect yourself from hidden toxics:

• Always read labels or ask about all the ingredients in any food you buy—everywhere
  
• Only buy whole foods; I mean real foods that are as close to their natural state as possible (whole grains, nuts, seeds, vegetables, fruit, legumes)
  
• Never buy anything that lists partially hydrogenated vegetable oil in it (even if it lists zero trans fats because the FDA allows companies to not list trans fats if a serving of an item contains .05 grams or less)
  
• Never buy an item that contains high fructose corn syrup, maltodextrin, dextrose or high amounts of any sugar
  
• Never buy an item if you don’t recognize any of the ingredients in it
  
• Avoid buying processed or packaged foods
  
• Never buy any food products that list any preservatives, artificial color or flavors
  
  Empower yourself to make healthy choices for a life time of good health. Rise up and revolt against companies who unscrupulously resort to greenwashing. The way you spend your money is a powerful way of voicing your demands for what you really want: Safe, healthy food.
  
  
  BIO
  Amira Elgan is a professional health counselor and author of the Vegetarian Organic Life newsletter http://vegetarianorganiclife.com/