Under fire: Dietetics group stops endorsing Kraft Singles

WASHINGTON — After outrage among its member dietician groups, the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics will end its partnership with the Kraft Food Groups that allowed the latter to use the former’s logo on slices of its pasteurized cheese.

Under the original deal, Kraft agreed to finance scholarships, research, and public awareness campaigns in exchange for its use of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics’ Kids Eat Right label and website address on its Kraft Singles products. Representatives of the food company said the labeling was part of a larger effort to educate children and parents about the importance of calcium and Vitamin D.

However, some of the 75,000 registered groups of the dieticians’ coalition didn’t buy into that logic, pointing out that Kraft creates “pasteurized prepared cheese products.” More than 50 percent of the calories from a cheese slice come from fat, causing many to wonder why the academy would endorse this product in the first place.

Plus, Kraft products don’t fall within the legal definition of real cheese, as outlined by the Food and Drug Administration — primarily because each slice contains less than 51 percent of unadulterated cheese. Other ingredients include milk protein concentrate, some fatty portions of milk, calcium phosphate, sodium phosphate, and sodium citrate, a food additive that’s used for flavoring or preservation.

Although the deal is already in motion, and the first of many labeled packages are set to appear on store shelves this week, the academy said that it would impose limits on its shelf life. Andy Bellati, the founder of Dieticians for Professional Integrity, is pleased with the move to end the partnership.

“Hopefully, this is the beginning of much-needed and much-overdue dialogue on the academy’s corporate sponsorships,” Bellatti told the New York Times on Tuesday. “Dietitians need to continue advocating for an organization that represents us with integrity and that we can be proud of, rather than continually have to apologize for.”

The Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics is hardly the first entity to form a partnership with the food industry. Earlier this month, Coca-Cola launched a public relations blitz, complete with radio segments and op-eds, to rebrand itself as a healthy snack option, despite making no changes to the product. Part of that strategy included colluding with dietary experts and public relations firms to “help bring context to the latest facts and science” around the ingredients in its products. All the glimmer and glitz around the campaign, however, hasn’t done much to take away from the more than 60 percent of fructose corn syrup content in each bottle.