Just What an Overfortified Nation Needs: Kraft's New Vitamin-Enhanced Gum
Kraft (KFT) has come out with two new chewing gum varieties fortified with vitamins, adding to the already absurdly and unnecessarily long array of supermarket products that are tarted up with synthetic nutrients. Shoppers are getting generous helpings of added vitamins and minerals from just about every breakfast cereal -- next time you're in the cereal aisle, try to find a box without them. They're also subjected to additional doses from bread, soda and flavored waters, and on top of that, many people are taking some sort of multivitamin, leading to a national case of vitamin overload.
Kraft's Trident Vitality Vigorate gum, which will a provide 10% of the recommended daily allotment of vitamin C, and its Stride Spark, which has 25% of vitamins B-6 and B-12, are both being marketed as healthy energy boosters.
Where are these vitamin-deficient Americans?
While there undoubtedly are some Americans with actual vitamin deficiencies, there probably aren't all that many of them. Gary Osifchin, a Kraft marketing director who oversees both the Stride and Dentyne brands, inadvertently made this point during an interview with the New York Times. He described the primary market for Stride Spark as teenagers and college students who like energy-boosting products like Red Bull. "Our target of young adults is very familiar with B vitamins," Osifchin said.
Exactly. The people who will be chewing Stride Spark are also chugging energy drinks, some of which provide close to 100% of your daily supply of B-6 and B-12. Why do they need more? The suggestion that Stride's new gum will give you a "spark" is based on the flawed notion that if some B vitamins are good, more are even better. The only people that stand a chance of getting a boost of energy from this gum are those completely deficient in B vitamins.
Vitamins: More aren't necessarily better
And even this idea is suspect. A succession of recent studies have shown that vitamin supplements don't have the health benefits we hoped they did. Maybe this is because Americans already have enough in their systems or because cheap synthetic vitamins manufactured in factories (often in China) aren't absorbed that well by the body (hence neon pee) and aren't the same thing as the vitamin C you get in an orange or the B-12 you get in an egg.
If anything, Kraft's new gums have the potential for more harm than good. Too many vitamins strain the kidneys and can be toxic.
As long as consumers buy into the still-thriving idea that added vitamins are some sort of cure all, Kraft may be able to use this ploy to sell a few more sticks of gum. But if they really wanted to some good, they'd take Stride Spark and Vitality Vigorate to developing countries where people don't have the same food that's available to U.S. consumers -- and could really use the nutrients.
Image by from Gum Alert
Related: