Perhaps you have consciously seen the Smart Choices logo at your grocery store (you’ve certainly seen it unconsciously, since it’s everywhere). AlterNet says that Smart Choices is a fraud:

What we have here is yet another corporate PR scam. This supposedly independent nutritional certification program was created and is paid for by such purveyors of unhealthy sugars, fats, salt and chemical additives as Coca-Cola, ConAgra, General Mills, Kellogg’s, Kraft and PepsiCo. Each of them pay fees of up to $100,000 a year to get to use the Smart Choices label, and the fees are based on the total sales of products that bear the label.

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Jacobson, who served on the initial panel to develop standards for the Smart Choices program, resigned last year noting “(the panel’s) main decisions are determined largely by industry members.”

Among the decisions that troubled him was one that allows the Smart Choices label to be applied, as Jacobson wrote, to foods “containing caffeine, food dyes, the preservative BHA, artificial sweeteners (particularly saccharin, aspartame and acesulfume-K) and other additives that are suspected of causing or have been shown to cause adverse reproductive, behavioral, or gastrointestinal effects or cancer.

But everything’s all right: the FDA, one of the most murderous organizations in the United States, will put a stop to it, maybe (probably not).

By early next year, officials said, the agency will issue proposed standards that companies must follow in creating nutrition labels that go on the front of food packaging.

That could force manufacturers to deliver the bad news with the good, putting an end to a common practice in which manufacturers boast on package fronts about some components, such as vitamins or fiber, while ignoring less appealing ingredients, like added sugar or unhealthy fats.

I’m all for exterminating frauds like Smart Choices, but this just seems like moving the problem around. Nothing replaces a sane food industry grounded in human interests… which we definitely don’t have.