Skipping yoghurt is not honest and truthful

Danone have been told that they have to withdraw a TV advert for Actimel, the probiotic yoghurt drink, because it is misleading. The adverts, rather improbably, show a bottle of Actimel jumping over a skipping rope, and claim that it is scientifically proven to give school-age children protection against illness, but the Advertising Standards Authority say that this claim cannot be upheld. This is interesting because it gives an insight into the sort of scientific testing that is carried out by a food company, and into the level of investigation carried out by the ASA.

Danone conducted 8 tests into the health improvements for children under the age of 16, varying from children hospitalised in India, children with allergic rhinitis and asthma, and to children in day care centres in the US and Russia. But the ASA have ruled that results of the Indian tests would not apply to healthy children, that the results of some others do not give a sufficiently significant improvement to support Danone’s claims, and that another set of tests, carried out on babies of 6 and 15 months, do not apply because the subjects of the tests are too young for the results to apply to school-age children. The ASA have therefore ruled that the advert was misleading and broke rules in relation to evidence and accuracy in advertising. Danone, not surprisingly, are disappointed – they say that their scientific claims were “sound and based on a large body of evidence”.