The FDA has warned General Mills that claims about heart benefits appearing on Cheerios boxes violate federal laws.

In particular, the company’s assertion that the iconic breakfast cereal has been “clinically proven to help lower cholesterol” effectively renders the product a drug, according to federal law.

Stephen Sundlof, the director of the FDA’s food-safety center, added that General Mills needs to file a new-drug application for Cheerios if it intends to leave the box labeling as it is.

Tom Forsythe, a gobsmacked GM spokesperson responded that Cheerios’ claim it can “lower your cholesterol 4% in 6 weeks” has been posted for 2 years, and that the labeling references a study in which Cheerios was factored into a low saturated fat, low cholesterol diet.

“The clinical study supporting Cheerios’ cholesterol-lowering benefit is very strong,” Forsythe told the Wall Street Journal.

An unimpressed Sundlof shot back that “we try to make a bright line between what can be said about a drug and what can be said about a food.”

A less specific claim that consuming whole-grain foods can reduce the risk of heart disease risk would be permissible in certain circumstances, he added.

In a letter to General Mills, the FDA said the food-maker must “promptly” correct the violations or else it would be forced to take action, which might include seizing products.

Apparently, the FDA’s intervention was prompted by a tip from the National Consumers League.

The FDA’s love letter follows by one month a case in which the Federal Trade Commission settled a dispute with Kellogg Co. regarding claims that Frosted Mini-Wheats improved children’s attentiveness by 20%.

Elderly women are afflicted by more than twice as many disabilities as age-matched men, according to scientists at Duke.

Assistant professor of medicine Heather Whitson and her colleagues reached this conclusion after evaluating 5,888 people aged 65 years or more.

Remarkably, obesity and arthritis accounted for 48% of the disability gender gap. 
 
Whitson presented the team’s findings at the Annual Meeting of the American Geriatrics Society.

The study “suggests that women’s tendency to pack on extra pounds in their child-bearing and peri-menopausal years translates into loss of independence in their old age,” she told BurrillReport.

Whitson raised concern that as the obesity epidemic continues unabated, disability rates among older adults are likely to increase, and the impact is likely to affect women disproportionately since they seem to be at higher risk for the problem.

She also noted that women are catching up to men when it comes to the incidence of stroke, cardiovascular disease and emphysema, conditions which can cause substantial disability in their own right.

Whitson’s study is the first to examine how the differential impact of chronic health conditions affects disability rates among the elderly. Many studies had examined how such gender-specific differences impact mortality. 
 
“The reason for the discrepancy in disability had not been well understood but we found that chronic health conditions that women experience in greater numbers than men explain part of that gap,” Harvey Cohen told Burrill. The senior author on the study chairs Duke’s Department of Medicine.
 
The researchers remained hopeful that women could become motivated to maintain a healthy weight if they knew how critical those extra pounds were in hastening the onset of disabilities and in increasing the risk that they might become a burden on their children or end up in a nursing home.