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NEW YORK - The Federal Trade Commission is keeping close watch on nutritional claims made by major food marketers, especially when their products are geared toward children, said Leonard Gordon, director of the northeast regional office of the Federal Trade Commission, earlier this month.
"More and more products - food products - are making health claims, and I think you're going to see more enforcement there," said Gordon during a briefing on the new direction of FTC consumer protection at law firm Venable's office here. "The Smart Choices [nutrition labeling] program has somewhat gone away, but as companies make more and more claims, they're going to need to have some science behind those or there are going to be some problems."
Gordon provided as an example a case in which Kellogg's touted a breakfast of Frosted Mini-Wheats as "clinically shown to improve kids' attentiveness by nearly 20%." An FTC complaint alleged that according to Kellogg's clinical study the claims were false, and only about half the children who ate Frosted...