According to surging news reports, in response to the "sugar control milk tea" launched by a tea brand, the Liangxi District Procuratorate of Wuxi City, Jiangsu Province recently issued a pre-trial procuratorial recommendation for administrative public interest litigation to relevant functional departments, urging them to supervise and manage the false publicity of the tea brand in accordance with the law. After the functional department carried out an investigation, the brand owner involved in the case was interviewed, requiring it to immediately stop the illegal act of false advertising, and fined it 32,<> yuan in accordance with the law.
Milk tea is generally high in sugar and is known as a "calorie bomb", which has made some health-conscious consumers shy away from it. The tea brand in question claimed that the drink "can inhibit the absorption of sucrose by about 70% by adding arabinose according to the ratio", and has the effect of "inhibiting the rise of blood sugar and preventing hyperglycemia". "Sugar control milk tea" is also favored because it dispels the concerns of consumers who need to control sugar or have weight loss needs.
However, after investigation, the content of arabinose in the bottled syrup used in the brand's stores is 0.36g, accounting for only 0.01%, which is far from reaching the content of arabinose to play a blocking effect, while the proportion of white sugar and white sugar is as high as 72.81%. It can be seen that the "sugar control milk tea" in the brand's advertising actually has no sugar control function. This is undoubtedly suspected of false advertising, when consumers buy and drink "sugar control milk tea", not only can not control the sugar, but drink more sugar.
In the past two years, with the improvement of people's health awareness, "healthy food" has become an outlet, and many food companies have turned to produce low-calorie foods and "zero sugar and zero calorie" drinks. Of course, there is no problem with this development direction, but merchants cannot play gimmicks, and the product must live up to its name.
The "health food" launched in some markets ostensibly caters to consumption upgrades, but in fact it is a "pseudo-upgrade" and is not as healthy as advertised. For example, a brand of beverage was previously advertised as "0 sucrose", but there were various "sugar substitutes" listed on the ingredient list... The tea brand involved was fined 32,<> yuan, which also sounded the alarm for the majority of businesses.
In the face of the mixed "health food" in the market, supervision also needs to be upgraded. Regulatory authorities may wish to conduct a round of physical examination of "healthy food" and use relevant technical means to protect the rights and interests of consumers.
In fact, the reason why these "health scams" have been tried and tested again and again is that after consumers' health awareness has been improved, health knowledge is still relatively scarce. Therefore, consumers should also improve their health literacy and prevent being fooled by unscrupulous merchants and paying the "IQ tax".
(Dai Xianren, Beijing News)