Former first lady Michelle Obama announced on Wednesday the launch of a new company that promises “to help raise a generation of healthier kids,” but critics are claiming her new juice drink deal is putting profit over the health of the children it is targetting.
Speaking at The Wall Street Journal’s “Future of Everything Festival,” Obama unveiled PLEZi Nutrition, a company she co-founded.
It is “an outgrowth of Mrs. Obama’s White House efforts to fight childhood obesity and improve children’s health,” The Journal reports. “Her ‘Let’s Move!’ campaign focused on promoting exercise and healthy eating.”
“If you want to change the game, you can’t just work from the outside. You’ve got to get inside,” Obama told the festival crowd. “You’ve got to find ways to change the food-and-beverage industry itself.”
(Video: YouTube)
“We’re hoping not just to provide healthy and delicious drinks and snacks for kids, but to jumpstart a race to the top that will transform the entire food industry,” she wrote on PLEZi’s website. “Because let’s face it, even after everything we accomplished during the White House years, it is still simply too hard for kids to grow up healthy.”
The first offering from PLEZi is fruit juice for kids. With four flavors to choose from, the beverage boasts 75% less sugar “than the leading fruit juices.”
But according to Fox News’s Jesse Watters, “Michelle has sold out to ‘Big Juice’ and she’s slinging unhealthy drinks for kids.”
(Video: Fox News Digital)
“She’s pushing fruit juice down their throats after she took the meat out of their school lunches,” Watters told viewers during “Jesse Watters Primetime” as he rolled a montage of kids turning their noses up at the Obama administration’s changes to the federal school lunch standards.
The juice industry is a “sugar-filled scam,” the host stated, adding that some glazed donuts contain less sugar than juice drinks.
Watters ticked off the additives that are listed on the label for Obama’s “healthy” drink, including citric acid, ascorbic acid, sodium citrate, and magnesium citrate.
“You know what drink tastes really refreshing and doesn’t have any of that? Oh, yeah – water,” he quipped. “But water doesn’t make you richer than your husband.”
A “whistleblower” on the state of the beverage industry, former Coca-Cola consultant Calley Means said that, as a parent, watching Obama pitch her drink made him “sick to [his] stomach.”
“We don’t recommend kids should smoke safer cigarettes,” he said. “But what sugary drinks is doing is far worse and we should not be recommending safe sugary drinks – We should be speaking very, very clearly. She’s working with a private equity company that specializes in junk food driven by celebrity partnerships.”
The studies that show beverages such as Obama’s in a good light are typically “rigged,” Means claimed.
“As a parent, I am begging Michelle Obama — this might not fund the new house in Martha’s Vineyard, but please, for the sake of children, speak clearly,” he urged the former first lady. “Kids should not be eating sugar and not be drinking sugar.”
On its website, PLEZi breaks down how much sugar “is ok for kids to consume in a day.”
In a move that one would think should get Michelle Obama canceled by the woke mob she often champions, PLEZi lists two tables: one for “boys” and one for “girls,” which suggests the two are somehow physically different. For some reason, it would appear that “boys” require more daily calories.
“The Dietary Guidelines for Americans recommend eating no more than 10% of total calories in added sugar per day,” PLEZi writes, directing readers to the two charts.
PLEZi Nutrition said in a press release to ABC News that it is “focused on lowering sugar content and lowering sweetness to help adjust kids’ palates to crave less sweetness overall.”
“In addition to reducing the sugar and sweetness,” the release said, “they are adding in nutrients kids need, all with the aim to replace sugary drinks and snacks.”
Writers and editors can be contacted at [email protected] with feedback, tips, or corrections.
Melissa Fine is the former executive editor of Casino Player, Strictly Slots, and Poker
Digest magazines. She is a UCLA graduate, news junkie, and dedicated Stargate SG-
1 fan. Melissa currently lives with her dog and two cats in a tiny town in the Sierra
Nevada foothills.
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