Product Marketers Bank On Your Ignorance

My favorite grocery store in NYC was always Fairway. Literally the best— if you know, you know.

It was in a Fairway, sometime around 2007 or 2008, that I noticed a carton of Tropicana orange juice displaying the phrase “cholesterol-free.”

Huh?

That literally did not make any sense (and it still doesn’t) because cholesterol comes from animals. And the last time I checked, oranges were not animals. (or are they???)

In the early 2000s, we were still deeply rooted in the low-fat craze that had Americans by the throat - I’m talking Snackwells, Crystal Lite, Olestra (more on this later), and 100-calorie snack packs. You know the ones. This was the era of the Atkins diet (which is now essentially the Keto or Carnivore diet - everything old becomes new again!), the South Beach Diet, and public health messaging centered on heart health.

Food companies were quick to deem their products “heart-healthy” to grab the attention of all the folks stumbling out of their cardiologist appointments with instructions to lower their cholesterol.

And so, we ended up with Tropicana marketing their orange juice as “cholesterol-free.”

I have zero data to support this, but given how little nutrition literacy there is now, I can only assume that in the early 2000s, it was even worse. My dad stopped eating avocados because he incorrectly believed that they were “loaded with cholesterol!!” (Dear reader, know that I tried to correct this assertion more than once - it wasn’t until his cardiologist, years later, told him that avocados don’t actually have cholesterol, that he decided they were okay again. 🙄)

A-NY-WAY

My point is this: Tropicana, and the billion other brands that made “heart-healthy” and “cholesterol-free” foods, in particular foods that would never have contained cholesterol (or fat of any kind) in the first place, were operating under the assumption that the American public didn’t know what cholesterol actually was. Roughly 20 years later, I still think this is true for a lot of people.

When trying to choose between two brands of OJ, the one that says “cholesterol-free!” sure seems better than the one that doesn’t say that. It must be, because otherwise, why would they point it out?!

Okay, back to Olestra. If you were around in the late ‘90s, you might recall that fat-free Pringles and WOW! Chips proudly proclaimed that they used Olestra, a new type of fat that didn’t actually count towards calories. The low-fat crowd loved this!