Splenda With Fiber

[beige_alert]

Michael Pollan:

I mean, what are we to make of a wonder of food science like the new Splenda with fiber? (“The great sweet taste you want and a little boost of fiber.”) Should we call this progress? Is it even food?

I had not heard of this, but, yes, apparently, there really is "SPLENDA® No Calorie Sweetener with Fiber." Really! It's on the splenda.com web site!

It's boggling. You have to wonder what inspired this weird combination. Never mind what technical challenges it presents, who thought to even try? My guess? Internal corporate rivalry. The research and development people thought the marketing people needed a real challenge! Let's see them market this!

Comments

[maedbh7.livejournal.com]

Kaylee: [about Simon's birthday cake] Couldn't get ahold of no flour, so it's mostly protein. In fact, it's pretty much what we just had for dinner.
[everyone laughs]
Kaylee: But I tried to get the frosting as chocolatey tasting as possible.

We're all just a few Government imprints on every molecule of the cargo away from eating genuine Grade A Foodstuffs like you see in the vids. -H...

[randomdreams.livejournal.com]

I bet it's the offshoot of a merger, "hm, we have a sweetener division, and we have a division that has to pay to get rid of all this wood pulp. If only we could figure out some way to get people to BUY the wood pulp..."

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

Synergy!

[hsifyppah.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a pretty easy sell to me - huge, huge diabetic market for splenda, all of whom are being told to eat more fibre for the beneficial glycemic effects. Plus the aging population generally has an increasing need for constipation remedies/prophylactics. That new Benefibre stuff whose selling point is "Less gross than Metamucil!" is selling like hotcakes in my store.

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

Ah, now I get it. It's not so much a food product as a drug product! That makes more sense!

[jaelle-n-gilla.livejournal.com]

I can just imagine the conversation:

Marketing guy: "We think the market wants fiber in anything edible, so we ask you to include it in our sweetener."
Scientist (goggles at him): "But... fiber is for the intestine to have something to work on. It's not digested."
Marketing (clueless): "So?"
Scientist: "You'll need ample volume of fiber to make a difference."
Marketing: "Oh, the customer can eat as much as they want."
Scientist: "then the food would be disgustingly sweet."
Marketing: "But it sounds good on the homepage."
Scientist: "Oh whatever... "

[madfilkentist]

Is it any stranger than orange juice with added calcium?

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

Oh yes! I'd forgotten about that stuff, which probably tells you something about my grocery shopping habits, which don't include looking at the orange juice aisle of the store with the 8000 varieties of juice with their bizarre label claims. Another triumph of the urge to add something in order to put a new claim on the label. "Already got vitamin C, and five different levels of pulp, what else can we add??"

[peteralway.livejournal.com]

It's.....Splider!