"Fudge Tracks" Are Not Health Food

Last year, Fitness Magazine compiled a list of the "healthiest" foods you can buy at your supermarket -- remember?



Well, stop the presses! Last month, Fitness Magazine unveiled the winners of its “Healthy Food Awards” for 2011!

According to the magazine, these foods are “[t]he best of the best! The complete collection of our annual picks for the most delicious health foods on the planet”! Did you hear that? THE! MOST! DELICIOUS! HEALTH! FOODS! ON! THE! PLANET!

And how did they pick the winners? Fitness Magazine shares its methodology:

We worked with top nutritionists to find hundreds of sweet, salty, and savory treats that are low in calories and fat. Then we crunched our way through them to bring you the best-tasting options to satisfy any craving -- and still keep you slim.

Oooh! "Top nutritionists"! "Low in calories and fat!" "Crunching!" Scientific!

So without further ado, here are a few of the items selected by Fitness Magazine as the “healthiest” foods available to us:

• Funley’s Original Stix in the Mud Chocolate Cookie Clusters (because they’re “individually wrapped for easy portion control”!)
• Kozy Shack Chocolate Pudding (it’s “made with low-fat milk”!)
• Skinny Cow Low-Fat Fudge Bars ("guilt-free" because, well, see above!)
• Frito-Lay's Rold Gold Pretzels (as one Fitness Magazine editor says, “the salt helps keep me going!” -- and we all know that salt is the human body’s primary energy source!)
• Deep Chocolate VitaMuffins (hey -- it says “Vita” so it’s gotta be healthy!)
• Coca-Cola's Vitaminwater Zero Rhythm (yes, the name "Zero Rhythm" is unfortunate -- but it's engineered to have zero calories!)
• Edy's Slow Churned Fudge Tracks Ice Cream (really? "Fudge Tracks”?)

Thank you, Fitness Magazine! Thanks for showing us that food quality doesn’t matter, and that we can freely eat highly-processed, sugary, lab-engineered foods -- so long as they’re low-fat, shrink-wrapped in 100-calorie packs and (most importantly) chocolatey. Who needs real food anyway? I mean, "our intellectual development has brought us a greater scientific understanding of the nutrients our bodies need to be healthy," right? And what our bodies need is more chocolate cookie clusters, dammit!

Frankly, it’s a relief to see that grass-fed, pastured meat and sustainably-grown vegetables aren’t anywhere on the magazine’s list of “healthiest” foods. Otherwise, I would’ve suspected that Fitness Magazine’s editors had caved to the influence of the nation's evil, super-powerful lobby of small, local farmers and ranchers.

Seriously, Fitness Magazine: It's not that hard.

Gary Busey: Fantasy Lawyer

Last month, a federal district court judge ruled that the Center for Science in the Public Interest could continue its lawsuit against Coca-Cola for misleading consumers about Vitaminwater's (lack of) health benefits. The judge pointed out that Vitaminwater is basically just a sugary, non-carbonated soft drink fortified with a few vitamins for marketing purposes.

In a strongly worded 55-page opinion, Judge John Gleeson of the U.S. District Court in Brooklyn said the health claims on some Vitaminwater bottles may be in violation of FDA regulations since the drink "achieves its nutritional content solely through fortification that violates FDA policy." The judge thinks Coke could be violating the so-called jellybean rule, which says that a food- or drinkmaker cannot load otherwise unhealthy products with vitamins or other nutrients in order to claim it is healthy. A sugar product is a sugar product: you can't say a jellybean fights heart disease because it contains no cholesterol.

It's a little weird (but kind of awesome), then, to see that Vitaminwater's new pitchman is a bug-eyed Gary Busey -- not exactly the model of health -- who practices "fantasy law" by physically assaulting people.