Concerning Food Marketing

Maybe we can fix it

Did you hear the one about the intermittent fasting snack bar? This actually does sound like a joke but it’s serious and you may have seen my post about it the other day.

I want to be clear that I think Dr. Valter Longo, who I was informed is the creator of this bar, is a tremendous scientist. I have the utmost respect for his work. I also think the product is pretty darn good. I haven’t tasted it but it has a pretty solid ingredient list. I also understand that the purpose of this bar is that it is “fasting mimicking” in that it should not spike blood sugar or insulin (I haven’t tested this yet but coming soon). I also think there are many different approaches to fasting that are useful for different goals and I think fasting mimicking is one of them.

I simply don’t like the marketing of this bar.

The label reads:

Intermittent Fasting Bar: Proprietary nutri-science allows you to fast with food

I think this creates a lot of confusion for those who are new to intermittent fasting further adding to the wide range of misinformation already surrounding this way of eating. Here is a response to a comment further elaborating on my views:

Fasting-mimicking diets are different from fasting diets and which is best for you is dependent on your goals. But the way this product is marketed, it will be easy for someone who is new to fasting to think that maybe you can eat while you fast, maybe you should eat while you fast, and then you may end up wondering why you aren’t seeing the results.

I doubt this company’s goal is to try to prevent people from seeing results or harm their health in anyway. I’m sure their goal is to provide a product that is fasting-mimicking and educate people on the benefits and use cases of this approach. If this is the case, I think its important to realize the limitations of educating through marketing. Especially when a product is bought off of the shelves in a store versus being purchased through a website.

While I am singling out this product, this is just a general problem with health food marketing that I have been able to see first hand from working full-time in the food industry. Either a company has good intention but doesn’t realize the limitation to their marketing (likely the case here) or they have business intentions which makes it very easy to make claims about a product or position it in a way that will reach a larger audience and drive more sales. And sometimes this happens without a thought about the downstream consequences of that approach. Sometimes intentional and other times unintentional.

This shouldn’t really be something we are surprised by though. Most companies do not exist to make you healthier, they exist to make money, grow, and support the people who created the company and those who work within it. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing and the people in these companies are far from evil. They are simply doing what is expected of them.

One of the really cool things Perfect Keto did was hire me as their education manager to prevent this type of thing from happening. My job was to review our marketing and make sure any claims that we made were based on science, the products we created were clean ingredient and beneficial to health, and the products were positioned properly so they would not be misleading or confusing to our customers. While we weren’t always perfect with this, we were always striving towards perfection and stopped a lot of bogus things along the way like marketing exogenous ketones for weight loss and collagen as the cure to ugliness (the last one was never a real thought lol)

Optimistic me believes that there can be a beautiful marriage between food companies desire to reach more people and grow AND focus on the health of their consumers but to do this its going to require an awareness of the problem, an understanding of marketing capabilities, thoughtful planning, and action to implement a plan similar to what we did at Perfect Keto. The food industry as a whole is a broken system, but a system can always be fixed.

Thanks for reading,

Chris Irvin

P.S. This newsletter is sponsored by my favorite CBD, Santa Cruz Medicinals. In a recent post, I talked about the importance of sleep for insulin sensitivity and Santa Cruz Medicinals Deep Sleep Caps is my favorite supplement for supporting better sleep. It has definitely saved me many times in the early months of parenthood and during seasons of travel!