Hang on a second. I’m just finishing up a Snickers® bar. Actually it’s my sixth of the day and, boy, am I feeling good about it. I’ve recently become aware of some exciting news and done some homework. With what I’ve learned coupled with the massive post-Halloween sales I’ve started on a new phase of my life. I’ve given up the salads and fruit and vegetables and grass-fed cheeseburgers. Awash in newfound understanding, to say nothing of near-lethal levels of blood glucose, I am now eating right, and eating healthy.

By eating chocolate.

Over the past few years, mostly since my return to the Land of Stuff, there has been this non-specific noise floating around the edge of my consciousness. It has grown louder over time. A while ago I noticed an announcement on bags of Raisinets. The labels now said: “30% less fat than the leading chocolate brands” and “natural source of fruit antioxidants”. Okay. There’s a bunch of meaningless information. I mean, Raisins are sort of fruit so any quantity of “antioxidants” would qualify and since the “leading chocolate brands” are pretty much all chocolate, it figures there would be less fat by about what the ratio of fat-in-chocolate to raisins is. My cynical-self wrote this off as more useless information targeted at people who weren’t blessed with a keen sense of the obvious.

But, as usual, I was wrong.

I’ve tried to trace my cynicism back to its source without success. It springs from some deep recess hidden in the wilderness that is my past. I mean, I’m sure my parents didn’t strive for me to grow up to be the King of the Skeptics, but for some reason, every time I interact with any mainstream media, I am absolutely certain that I’m being lied to. Part of this distrust comes from the circumstances of my youth. In my house, which was a typical Mom, Dad, Buddy, and Sis 1960s household, we would gather every day for dinner. I know this seems so quaint in Modern Times but that’s really the way it was back then. During these dinners my father would relate the details of his workday to the assembled family.

What a cruel thing to do.

He was one of these people who could remember every word of a conversation and, in lieu of just playing a tape, would retell the conversation verbatim at dinner. Being a child, I thought this was just grownup stuff. But there was nothing else to listen to, so listen I did. In torturous detail. To everything my dad spent his day doing. At his job.

In advertising.

The result was that, from a tender age, I was inculcated with the facts and figures proving beyond a doubt that absolutely everybody, everywhere, was trying to sell something; and lying about it in the process. But I still don’t know why I’m so cynical.

In any event, this early steeping in the waters of commerce has given me a clear insight into how marketing, advertising, and packaging is designed with only one goal in mind: to get you to buy the stuff. The facts be damned. So, when I first encountered health claims on a product that was merely an attractively packaged mix of fat and sugar, I started paying attention.

Antioxidants, as you all know from watching TV, are a class of chemicals which, unbelievably, prevent oxidation. They are found in everything from industrial chemicals to paint and food. Phosphoric acid, drawing double-duty, is both an excellent rust preventer as well as an ingredient in Coca-Cola. In most foods, these antioxidants come in the form of dietary acids, such as Vitamin C AKA ascorbic acid; and plant polyphenols. In our bodies the purpose of these antioxidants is to scavenge that scourge of life: free radicals. We produce these free radicals as a normal part of metabolism with the added complication that environmental pollution can introduce additional oxidizers, like ozone, into the system. See how this gets tricky when you stop and think about it?

Deep breath.

When your body has an optimum quantity of antioxidants one of them will bump into a free radical, allow itself, rather than you, to be oxidized and, in the process, destroy the free radical. Life is maintained and spontaneous combustion prevented.

Discounting phosphoric acid as a good idea for a dietary supplement, these very helpful dietary acids and plant polyphenols, you would think, should be eaten regularly. In fact, over the millennia, our forebears did just that with their diet of plants, grains, nuts and squirrels. Recently, however, many of us have traded our diet of bartered-for legumes and rodents for one of bags of frozen Trader Joe’s® Cheese and Sausage Tortellini and our consumption of these all-important antioxidants has plummeted. We could very easily revert to our simpler diet but there is an irresistible force preventing that.

Nobody would make any money.

So the food companies – as opposed to the food producers – sat down and created the most evil combination known to exist: they put scientists and marketers together in one room. 

They decided that “Antioxidant”, by itself, sounded way too chemical. “Plant polyphenol” although exactly accurate, smacked of Mormonism. (Wait for it…) So together, they devised a term both accurate and grammatically versatile that is at once compelling and completely unintelligible to the consumer.

“Flavonoid” was what they came up with. Technically, flavonoids are ketone-containing secondary metabolites found ubiquitously in plants. Glad we got that clarified. Which, as you can tell, only means that they are made by all plants just by being plants. Inside of plants they are largely responsible for certain pigment shades – except green, and that’s about it. So the marketers said to the scientists: “Go forth and find us some flavonoids.” A task about as difficult as telling somebody to go outside and find some air.

Which is how I come to be sitting at my desk with a bag of Brookside® Dark Chocolate Acai with Blueberry candy at my side. I got them at Costco®. On the cover is a tempting picture of acai berries and blueberries all jumbled with the candy which, as you would expect, are these chocolate covered round things. At the top of the page are the words “Natural Source of Flavanol Antioxidants”. From the picture and this description you’d kind of get the idea that the bag contains little berries dipped in chocolate. Like Raisinets®, but slightly on the exotic side. In fact, the fine print at the bottom says that what you’re getting is actually “sweetened real fruit juice pieces, made from a mix of acai berry juice, blueberry juice, and other select fruit juices, dipped in our extra smooth dark chocolate”.

Which is the point where I got distracted from the whole “flavonoid” thing and started wondering, “How the heck do you make a piece of juice?” I looked into this further and found the juices were acai and blueberry along with pomegranate, elderberry, cranberry, raspberry and lemon. These are all mixed with sugar, corn syrup and pectin to come up with a product that is berry flavored, extremely sweet, and the consistency of a tire. The substance is as far removed from “juice” as concrete is from watercress, but the rubbery nuggets will hold a chocolate covering.

Despite my misgivings about their construction, I was sure that the berry juice gave these little nuggets their potent kick of flavonol antioxidants. Nope, there on the back of the bag, in small print were the words, “chocolate, a natural source of flavanol antioxidants”. It wasn’t in the fruit. It’s in the chocolate. But it did pass their spell-checker.

The scientists came through. They succeeded in finding scientifically provable relationships between flavonoids and improved health – the French Paradox of drinking one’s way to good health, is an example. From there it was a short step for the marketers to link any flavonoid in any form to a healthful lifestyle. The bags of chocolate covered “juice pieces” started flying off the shelf. Never mind that each serving contains 100 milligrams of flavonoids linked to a healthy life, compared to seventy times that much fat, scientifically linked to obesity and heart disease, and twenty-five times that much sugar similarly tied to obesity and diabetes. These little nuggets are basically very tasty poison. With a catchy slogan.

So now we find ourselves in the midst of the Great Flavonoid Wars. Forget fresh fruits and vegetables, the real money is in chips (if you can believe that) and chocolate. The current big-gun barrage comes from Mars, Inc., the makers of Snickers®. They upped the ante with a new line of chocolate products that are specifically marketed as health food. Their advertising promises to “support healthy circulation” by using their “patented and proprietary” Cocoapro® processed products CocoaVia™ and Cirku™. Cirku™ being the “fruit-flavored alternative” to the “dark-chocolate flavored” CocoaVia™. While not FDA verified, all of their health claims are supported by nearly “two decades” of research sponsored, conveniently enough, by Mars, Incorporated.

But, and I must admit this, the research is valid. Flavonoids are scientifically proven to be good for you, even when their delivery system, a rich Bordeaux for example, may seem to be a bit unorthodox. So what’s my beef? Why am I getting all cynical about Mars, Inc. claiming health benefits for their products? It’s because they don’t tell you the whole story. Red wine, with its proven effectiveness, contains just a tiny fraction of the flavonoids found in chocolate. You don’t need a ton of these obscure little chemicals to benefit from them. If you did, you wouldn’t opt for chocolate with its early-death downside, you’d eat capers and get something like forty times the flavonoids of pure cocoa.

The companies, like Mars, which try and sell me things based on how good one tiny ingredient of their product is are evil. They highlight the good while ignoring the bad; even though they’re the ones putting the bad in the bag. Tell me what’s in there and let me decide if I should eat it. Don’t play me for a fool by making up how candy is healthy. They pack a bunch of crap together, come up with a marketing angle that implies something that’s not true, then try to make me believe that it is. They’re not selling real health and they’re not even selling real candy.

They’re just selling.

And that’s just wrong.