Ragu's take on vegetables more hype than help

You have to expect that companies would take full advantage of a 6-episode series on food and nutrition, and place advertising that correlates with the programming.

So watching "Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution" can be educational, even during the commercials.

Coming first out of the break at about :37 was a spot for Ragu. The ad is a take on kids and vegetables: on Monday, the boy feeds his broccoli to the dog; on Tuesday, he feeds the dog carrots.

But on Wednesday, the boy ignores the dog because Mom presented him with a serving of vegetables in the form of Ragu spaghetti sauce.

As the company points out, "Ragu has more than a full serving of veggies in every ½ cup."

The company's Web site notes that the sauces meet the FDA guidelines for healthy. This is defined as "To be considered "healthy" by the FDA, pasta sauce must be low in fat and saturated fat, contain limited amounts of cholesterol and sodium, and contain a minimum amount of certain nutrients."

Ragu doesn't offer nutritional information on its Web site, but the vegetables that the kid feeds to his dog on Monday and Tuesday don't look like they are cooked with a lot of salt and sugar, er, high-fructose corn syrup (does this mean Ragu counts 'corn' as part of the vegetable?). Those FDA guidelines seem a little shallow.

While this particular Web site has a look at Ragu's label, the update is from 2006. In the 2006 update, a ½ cup serving has 580 mg of sodium and 6 grams of sugar. Unless the recipe has changed dramatically, those aren't great numbers.

And the commercial goes out of its way to show a small serving of sauce on the kids plate. Chances are you or your loved ones won't limit yourself to a ½ cup (4 oz.) serving of sauce. The official Ragu Web site suggests a 26 oz. jar per pound of pasta, which works out to 6.5 oz. per quarter-pound of pasta.

Jamie Oliver is fighting a lot of demons in our society. Marketing is one of those demons. Ragu has every right to advertise its take on vegetables, because it's a free country. But as Oliver and others are pointing out, we need to do a better job of looking past the hype.

Kids might be able to enjoy a little Ragu, but they also need those broccoli and carrots, too.

Broccoli and carrots don't get marketed, yet their benefits are better than a ½ cup of processed spaghetti sauce with salt and sugar. Eating better involves a lot of different things; being cynical about marketing is a helpful tool.

Comments

[NikeD]

Simple is beautiful ah! Your blog is very simple! But very unique! Especially your articles so good!

[trace]

Why is Ragu allowed to say that their sauce contains veggies? The tomato is a fruit, not a vegetable! And their are NO other veggie ingredients in some of their sauces.