The idiocy of food reformulation

Apparently, it is asking too much of people on a diet to refrain from eating chocolate bars.

From the Telegraph...

Cadbury's has launched a diet Dairy Milk chocolate bar in the first recipe change since 1905, with lower sugar Jelly Babies and Oreos to follow.

A new version of the classic bar containing 30 per cent less sugar will go on sale on Wednesday as part of industry efforts to respond to the obesity crisis.

That's the obesity crisis. The thing that Public Health England is strong-arming the food industry into mass product reformulation to tackle.

The firm announced the new bar last year, the month after the Government unveiled the second phase of proposals to halve childhood obesity by 2030.

That's childhood obesity. I can't stress the word obesity enough.

But whilst the sugar content has dropped from 56g per 100g in the original bar to 39g per 100g in the new version, the calorie content remains similar between the two bars.

It's not really a 'diet' version, then is it? And it's not going to have any effect on obesity.

And if Cadbury's think they can appease the government by cutting 30 per cent of the sugar, they've obviously forgotten that they are also expected to cut 20 per cent of the calories in the next few years.

This is all so utterly pointless. We saw the same thing with Coco Pops last year when Kellogg's annoyed their customers by taking out 30 per cent of the sugar. This reduced the energy content of a bowl of Coco Pops by a whopping one calorie. (Because - whisper it - there are not actually that many calories in a gram of sugar.)

Even if you are mad enough to believe that the government should be taking arbitrary quantities of ingredients out of food to allow people to stuff their faces without getting fat, this is clearly not the way to do it.

This is what you get when bureaucrats take over, and stupid targets take precedence over common sense.