Despite being highly processed and not at all healthy, consumers still purchase box after box of “natural” and organic breakfast cereals thinking it’s good for them.
This is because consumers get so easily excited about a label with just one or two ingredients and no chemicals or preservatives, but rarely seem to consider how those ingredients are sourced or processed – which is many times more important!
Kashi GoLean, an extremely popular brand of “natural” cereal recently got slapped for abusing this misplaced consumer trust by The Cornucopia Institute’s Cereal Crimes report.
A box of Kashi GoLean cereal was purchased from a Whole Foods in Boston and sent to an accredited lab for testing.
The findings?
The cereal was 100% GMO and had pesticide residues despite having “natural” on the label.
Kashi responded by saying the information was inaccurate and misleading because it was not based on a formal scientific analysis of Kashi products.
Huh??
How can testing a box of Kashi cereal at an accredited lab not be scientifically accurate?
Oh wait, I know! Â It’s because Kashi wasn’t funding the testing behind the scenes so they could stealthily control the results that were reported, right?
Kashi’s arrogant and lame response is typical of giant food manufacturers like Kellogg, which owns Kashi, who are used to being able to claim just about anything they want about their products and get away with it.
Even more lame, when it became apparent that Kashi wasn’t going to be able to spin its way out of the PR nightmare, it was announced that Kashi would be 100% GMO free by …
2015!
Don’t worry guys. Â Keep on eating that GMO, pesticide laced cereal for just a few more years and we’ll be sure to get our act together and get rid of them before you’re in a wheelchair! Â And, if we’re lucky, you will forget all about this messy public relations snafu in a few short months so we won’t really have to change at all!
The fact is, Kellogg supports GMOs for use in “natural” products. According to the grassroots organization GMO Free USA, Kellogg is actively working against requiring the labeling of GMOs having contributed $33,000 so far to propaganda campaigns to defeat it.
Best not to trust food companies with your most important meal of the day and go barcode free with your breakfast choices. Â The soaked cereals of traditional cultures are an excellent choice or, if you really need a cold breakfast cereal, make a truly healthy one yourself so that it doesn’t contain the extruded, denatured, allergenic cereal grains of the heavily processed, boxed variety that are falsely promoted on the label as somehow healthy because they are natural or organic.
Sarah, The Healthy Home Economist
Bottom line: if it’s not organic I don’t buy it.
Yikes! Thanks for this info.
this is good to know!
The greedy gets richer. I wonder if these people are eating healthy of wolfing down the cereals themselves!
I am sure they do not eat this stuff. Not those that the top atleast. Maybe some of the lower level people working for these big companies or at any level of government/special interests.
Monsanto won’t let employees eat their own GMO food in their cafeterias! http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/gm-food-banned-in-monsanto-canteen-737948.html?afid=af
Thanks for this article!
This is just one of the products out in the market claiming to be organic and natural but is the exact opposite. People should not be just relying on what is written on the package. Do you think strict GMO labeling would be a big help?
Kashi never claims to be “organic.” They use the weasel word “natural” – which means a lot less.
Thank you for sharing this – It is so dissapointing to see what big companies are doing to our food supply and what they are promoting as “food”. Although I am not sure cereal counts as food, this is another example of the deceptions going on…
yah well we only eat cereal usually about 4 or 5 boxes a year. I see it as a treat. hahaha.we get it for camping etc.however I did have it as a wierd craving at end of prego. but not kashie as I didn’t want even organic soy let alone gmo because of headaches durning prego. oh and yes i eat organic soy. i know what some think of that but i and many naturel people disagree.
I can’t stand their commercials actually saying their cereal is comparable to an EGG!!!
No kidding…. at last estimate, 86% of all corn grown, 93% of soy, canola, and cottonseed are all genetically grown. What has happened is that they made these crops “Roundup ready”, which means that all the pesticides applied to these crops during their growth is absorbed by these plants and passed on to the finished product for us to consume. There is a Monsanto anecdote that is going around which has sobering consequences… “No food shall be own that it does not own”….This is truly scary…. States need to pass any GMO labeling initiatives that come before the voters… California has Proposition 37 coming before the voters in November… Monsanto is going to spend MILLIONS in trying to defeat this proposition with TV advertising that blatantly spread lies and scare tactics without regard. If they are challenged about the validity of their statements, they will simply states AFTER the election…”so sorry… we may have been wrong”… yeah right…
That should be “No food shall be grown that it does not own”…