Coca Cola wants to make you beautiful

by Christopher Wharton

Soon to hit the shelves: a skin care beverage called Lumae, produced by Coca Cola and L’Oreal.  The product is meant to aid women in caring for their skin by acting as a vehicle for delivering nutrients important for skin health.

The product is still in development, so the companies haven’t said yet what the drink will contain.  One could make some reasonable guesses though, and I bet you’ll find B vitamins, vitamin C, and perhaps vitamins E or A (as beta-carotene) in there.  You might find some minerals and purported antioxidants among the ingredients as well.

It’s worth the mention that there isn’t a single nutrient necessary for skin health that you could get in Lumae, but couldn’t get in a balanced diet (or a not-so-balanced diet plus a multivitamin/multimineral supplement).  It’s also worth mentioning that there is potentially quite a bit you could miss out on by trying to care for your skin with a beverage rather than through eating lots of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains.  With any of these whole foods, you get a complex mixture of generally healthful compounds all in one natural package.  Many of these compounds have been identified as necessary for good health or at least potentially helpful in staving off disease.  However, there are probably numerous compounds that could aid in health (of many parts of the body, let alone skin) that aren’t identified yet.  Fortified beverages won’t contain these.

As long as you’re not frankly deficient in particular nutrients, the “quality” of your skin is more dependent on genetics than anything else.  In most cases, your best bet is to eat well and moisturize.

Comments

[Ben]

+and a broad-spectrum sunscreen to prevent any number of problems.

[Mara]

"In most cases, your best bet is to eat well and moisturize."

Yeah, and not age. Oh well, maybe the CRs have a point:).

Seriously, I don't see why one cannot do as Dr. Wharton advises And also drink this new beverage.

As long as it's not loaded down with sugar. Somehow I feel it will be.

Is that better for me than the diet soda I consume? I'm trying to ween myself off diet soda (and drink seltzer water, say) but I fear becoming so healthy I will be a bore to myself much the way overly healthy people strike me as rather one-dimensional.

I will have to see what this new drink offers.

It sounds like a gimmick but what else is new? Snake oil has been around for a long time.

[Chris]

Ben - good point!

Mara - I agree. One COULD drink the new beverage and eat well with (seemingly) no harm done. What I vehemently disagree with, as you alluded to at the end of your post, is the gimmicky nature of these sorts of products. Food companies too often take advantage of people who don't necessarily know better. And how could they? We certainly all can't be experts in everything. So, individuals end up spending money on, and investing hope in, products that probably won't deliver. This happens too often in the world of weight loss, and so I rail against it anywhere I see it crop up.

"So, individuals end up spending money on, and investing hope in, products that probably won't deliver. This happens too often in the world of weight loss, and so I rail against it anywhere I see it crop up."

I also have to wonder a crucial part of the reason why people fall prey to such advertising is that they want two things (seemingly) opposed to each other:

-fun, treat-type foods to eat and bevarges to drink

-to be beautiful and have a model's figure as well as be healthy (dreams of looking like a model are doomed to fail for most, yet one can be healthy and eat well, I feel).

I do not think it's truly ignorance that drives people to buy such products.

To me it's both hope (albeit misplaced) allied with not wanting to experinece too much pain when trying to eat better.

For myself, I think a smoothie with plain yougurt (low Or full fat) and strawberries would be the way to go for both health and taste most of the time.

(As for sunscreen, I don't use it much. I love the sun. I love to sit in it with my face towards it for a period of time each day in the summer months. But I never try to get a tan. Moderation).

[Shefaly]

Christopher, you say "One could make some reasonable guesses" which indicates that you are really speculating on possible contents of the proposed drink. I am not sure it is fair either to Coke/ L'Oreal or to yourself.

Putting my marketer's cap on (Sorry! Once an MBA, always an MBA), I see a few issues:

1. The real problem is that somewhere you are not able to reconcile the 'positioning' of Coke and that of L'Oreal with the concept of anything remotely healthy and beneficial. One could say the two firms have almost been too successful in their branding, if this problem is bothering someone as smart as you.

2. There is a reason why companies brand products variously rather than name them just as an extension of the corporate brand. It allows them to diversify their brand portfolio without damaging any individual brand.

Some examples:
Tropicana? Orange Juice, with bits, without bits, fortified with Calcium and so on, right? Healthy in most people's eyes. Owned by PepsiCo, otherwise a peddler of sugared fizzy drinks.

Minute Maid? Ditto for healthy qualities. Owned by Coca Cola company, otherwise peddling sugared fizzy drinks like Pepsi does, only Coke gets flagellated more often than Pepsi.

3. How do we know what the said product might contain? It may have a 'beauty' oriented positioning. So what? You have forgotten one basic tenet of good skin - and trust me, my first post-MBA job was in the cosmetics industry - and that is drink plenty of water! Anything that can add to a person's liquid intake, without adding to their payload of free radicals or sugar will likely benefit their skin. This applies to both men and women.

4. The fault of the Coke-L'Oreal strategy, in my view is that they spoke too soon, even before the product is ready. 'Advertising' before the product is ready to hit the shelves can be a major blunder, likewise for PR. Now they have left the gates wide open for speculation and negative publicity to damage the product even before it is launched.

If your intent was to criticise promise-led marketing of cosmetics, I am not sure the post delivered on that promise. Much as both food and cosmetics are regulated by the same broad FFDCA in the US, the rules governing both are very different.

With the limited information in the public domain, we can only speculate, and speculation is not discussion, it is just idle chit-chat. Don't you agree?

[Shefaly]

Disclaimer: I was NEVER employed by L'Oreal or in any of the other brands that the stable includes: Garnier, Maybelline, Kerastase, Redken, Lancome, Biotherm, Helena Rubinstein, Kiehl's, Shu Uemera, Cacherel, Viktor & Rolf, Vichy, SkinCeuticals, Ralph Lauren and Giorgio Armani cosmetics.

Perhaps a good example of why companies use different brands!

[jj]

"In most cases, your best bet is to eat well and moisturize."

No, a better bet would be to eat well and use sunscreen! Reduces your risk of wrinkles, photoaging and most importantly melanoma!

[Mara]

Just don't smoke, you'll have pretty good skin until as long as you can, but we all Do age (and I do mean ALL of us).

Shefaly makes some excellent points. It may well be this is really just a gimmick, or it might be a good product. Time will tell.
Coke and L'oreal do make strange bedfellows, but that's nothing new.
We'll just have to judge this product on its own merits - if they will have any.
Christopher Wharton does well to fight misleading products but not everything out there is meant to simply extract our money from us without doing any good.
I can't imagine I'd really want to drink this Lumae stuff, however...

[Shefaly]

Mara, Coke and L'Oreal may appear to make strange bedfellows but the product is being offered by a joint venture, named BPW, between Coke and Nestle. Nestle owns 1/4 of L'Oreal.

Just like in policy studies encourage one to examine political affiliations and funding sources (with THEIR political affiliations), way back the MBA taught one to examine ownership structures. Thanks.

[Mara]

"...but the product is being offered by a joint venture, named BPW, between Coke and Nestle. Nestle owns 1/4 of L'Oreal."

This figures, of course. It's probably wise to have strong doubts as to whether or not a product affiliated with soda truly has our best interests at heart in terms of better skin.

Still, you bring up some very good points to mull over, Shefaly.

[april]

Hi Dr. Wharton,

Unfortunately, most people are not getting their essential nutrients from food. Take the diet of most anyone you know, even those who think they are eating "healthy" and you'll find that they're missing many essential nutrients. Especially calcium for women, a serious concern for bone health.

Is the answer to drink a Coke product? Of course not! But I sure would like to see the Rudd Center pushing for more education in schools not only about avoiding truly noxious foods (like sugary sodas) but also about getting proper nutrition. In our obesogenic, capitalist food enviornment, nutrition is the very last thing most people think of when deciding what to put in their mouths. Taste, convenience, ideas about glamour put into our heads by marketers, but nutrition, never!

It's not that hard to learn about nutrition, especially with all the free tools available online to anyone with a computer and a network connection. Kids these days can play very complex video fantasy games, so I'm sure they could handle nutritional software. A serious look at the nutrition in our foods might lead the younger generation to demand better from the food industry.

Re: skin care: my entire life I had very bad dry skin, even chapping and itching/flaking in the winter. Then I started using flax oil, a teaspoon morning and a teaspoon night in my food. Now I have silky smooth skin all year round. That and excellent nutrition are my skin and hair care regimen. I don't use fancy expensive products, but I have better skin and hair than ever before.

a

[Mara]

The lure of commercialism will always be with us and it's not All bad.

I think it's great to be educated about products. Lumae might turn out to be unhealthy - or maybe not.

Beyond Lumae, it seems that in America we either have an attitude towards food of out and out craziness around eating anything and everything no matter how poor quality it is - or the flip side: a very strict, severe and rigid approach to food.

Where's the balance?

Like it or not, we all live in a world filled with commercials for food coming at us daily.

Even if much of this food is poor quality, low-nutrition stuff, that does not mean all of it is.

I find that in my attempts to eat good food, I feel so much strain from this culture which maintains I must either:

1.diet diet diet my way to success (and there are so many diets to chose from - oh, Excuse me - I mean "lifestyle changes"...well it's still a diet though it has a new term...)

2.or else I'm out of control if I have some snack foods and do not eat perfectly.

Again, I ask: Where's the balance????

I support Dr. Wharton's efforts in terms of really questioning products like Lumae.

But let's not become such purists that we demonize Everything.

To believe that people "never" think about nutrition when they eat is not true at all, and such a statement really is saying that we must rely upon the "experts" to show us the way to eat because we are all much much too ignorant on our own.

Unfortunately, all this talk of dieting and health have not done much to eradicate obesity.

I doubt this is due to misinformation or lack of information: I think many people are now quite well informed about what they are "supposed" to eat. (Even though the "guidelines" often seem to change faster than it takes to gulp down a sports beverage).

I wonder the side of America that insists upon *purity* in food consumption has unleashed something crazy in how we approach food (that is, for "balance" to this overly rigid side of our culture we have an overly permissive, anything-goes side)?

We fall prey to advertisers rather than listening to our own (gut) intution about what foods to eat for good health.

Along with all the adverstising for "junk" are the "diet experts" who Also tell us how to eat.

Which only makes many fall prey to new ways to get rid of headaches (bring on the newly improved even More industrial-strength ibuprofin)!!!

I think an overly purist mind-set toward food and health is another form of toxicity in terms of becoming very intolerant about food. It's a toxic mindset.

And here's something to ponder: if we did not act as if wrinkles and gray hair were the end of everything, we might not need to try to fight normal aging quite so much.

[Chris]

Great discussion, everyone. I'd like to address Mara's last comment. I fully agree with the 'middle of the road' approach: "all things in moderation" (including, occasionally, moderation) is the ideal. Unfortunately, we eat to extremes in this country. This isn't necessarily the fault of the individual because the food environment is more insidiously influential than people realize. What I'm trying to highlight here is that products like Lumae, and others meant for weight loss, purport to be useful in dealing with 'x' issue under the guise of delivering important nutrients, but without a sound body of science to support them. I wrote a blog entry on Enviga, yet another Coke/Nestle product, because it's referred to as "The Calorie Burner" despite having just one small, non-generalizable study behind it. I consider this misinformation sufficient to coax a good many individuals to spend money on potentially useless products in hopes of a short-term fix, rather than considering sensible behaviors as solutions to problems. Thus, gimmicky products continue to support behavior other than sensible, middle-of-the road approaches, and can contribute to an obesogenic environment (if only because individuals pursue these 'product strategies' that won't work while not pursuing sensible strategies that could). To be clear, my concern with Enviga, Lumae, Diet Coke Plus (another product on which I've written), or any other similar product has little to do with the nutritional contents. Instead, I am concerned with the perception and the message associated with the product and how that affects one's efforts at health behavior change.

[Mara]

"Thus, gimmicky products continue to support behavior other than sensible, middle-of-the road approaches, and can contribute to an obesogenic environment (if only because individuals pursue these 'product strategies' that won't work while not pursuing sensible strategies that could)."

This is because those "sensible" approaches are still extremely difficult for obese people to sustain (plus, BMI expectations for people to meet have become rather severe as well. Check out the program "Diet Wars"

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/diet/view/

if you haven't seen it yet; very informative. The narrator, who dieted down to 194 from 210 decided that 194 was okay for him rather than the 172 he was "supposed" to be for his height, according to BMI data. Of course, he looks and feels great at 194 and does not appear overweight at all, despite what his BMI "should" be).

Maybe if we approached diet changes and weight in modest ways with modest expecations, more could be done so that people do not lose a lot of weight only to regain it all back again (and then some).

We can't expect every person who is overweight or obese to become "thin".

I think it is this "thin and healthy" ideal that helps to push products like "Lumae", no matter how informed the public may be.

This bothers me more, actually, than products like "Lumae", this constant expectation that "thin" is available to anyone who just tries hard enough and finds the right diet.

I know what I think of as "moderate" and "sensible" seems to conflict with what many experts think of in those terms regarding exercise and food.

Everyone is an individual with different health needs and different strentghs. Health can't be one-size fits all.

[Chris]

Good points, Mara. Sensible approaches are extremely difficult to maintain within our fast-food/convenience food-dominated environment. As such, we try to focus more on environmental change at the Rudd Center, with the hope that real changes in the environment in which people live will facilitate simpler and easier health behavior change that currently is so difficult to achieve.

As for BMI, I tend to agree. Though high BMI has been established as an independent risk factor at the population level, I don't believe it is necessarily a risk factor for disease at the individual level.

Thanks for your and others' contributions to this discussion!