The Children’s Food and Beverage Advertising Initiative (CFBAI), a program of the Council of Better Business Bureaus, today announced a groundbreaking agreement that will change the landscape of what is advertised to kids by the nation’s largest food and beverage companies. For the first time, these food and beverage companies, who do the vast majority of advertising to children, will follow uniform nutrition criteria for foods advertised to children.

These uniform nutrition criteria, designed by CFBAI and top food industry scientists and nutritionists, will further strengthen voluntary efforts to change child-directed food advertising. Approximately one in three products currently advertised to kids do not meet the new nutrition criteria. While individual companies already have strong nutrition criteria for the products they advertise, the new uniform nutrition criteria will require many companies to change the recipes of these products or they will not be able to advertise them after December 31, 2013. The new criteria encourage the development of new products with less sodium, saturated fat and sugars, and fewer calories.

“These uniform nutrition criteria represent another huge step forward, further strengthening voluntary efforts to improve child-directed advertising. Now foods from different companies, such as cereals or canned pastas, will meet the same nutrition criteria, rather than similar but slightly different company-specific criteria. The new criteria are comprehensive, establishing limits for calories, saturated fat, trans fat, sodium and total sugars as well as requirements for nutrition components to encourage,” said Elaine Kolish, Vice President and Director of the CFBAI.

The result of a year-long effort to further improve the nutrition composition of foods advertised to children, the new CFBAI criteria take into account food science, U.S. dietary guidelines, and the real-world difficulties of changing recipes of well-known foods. The new CFBAI uniform criteria fill gaps in the system of company-specific standards. They also recognize the inherent differences in food (more…)

At 5 feet tall and 80 pounds, 11-year-old Julianna doesn’t look very much like a weightlifter. The Webster Groves, Mo., sixth-grader says the biggest thing she ever lifts is her 5-year-old brother. Until a few days ago, she thought a kettlebell was a something to ring, not a piece of weight-training equipment.

Recently, Julianna took and passed an online test for the St. Louis-based American Sports and Fitness Association — a 75-question exam that qualified her to become a certified, card-carrying kettlebell instructor.

How difficult was the test? She finished it in 10 minutes with a score of 89 percent, after the website gave her most of the correct answers on her second attempt. “I wish they would do that in school,” she said.

Kurtis Scott Lippman of Affton, Mo., is president of the American Sports and Fitness Association, which was incorporated in Missouri in September 2007.

Better Business Bureau says that the association’s testing program illustrates an ongoing problem in the area of personal training and exercise certification. People with few qualifications and virtually no knowledge of a subject can receive official-looking certificates indicating an expertise in everything from sports nutrition to kickboxing by simply visiting the website, answering a list of questions and paying $99 or more, depending on the type and length of certification. And don’t worry if you can’t answer the questions the first time through. The American Sports and Fitness Association tells you which answers you missed and lets you continue retaking the test until you get 70 percent correct, the score needed for certification.

“It’s embarrassing for our industry,” said a personal trainer for a well-known St. Louis area gym. “You can be driving a truck one day and working as a personal trainer the next.”

Steve Ball, associate professor of exercise physiology at the University of Missouri at Columbia, called many online certification programs “a joke.” He said businesses around the U.S. “come up with a fancy (more…)