NZ schoolgirls find Vitamin C fruit drink lacks C - GlaxoSmithKline faces $3 million fine

[charlie]

Yay DIY science! Yay Girl Power!

Two New Zealand schoolgirls humbled one of the world's biggest food and drugs companies after their school science experiment found that their ready-to-drink Ribena contained almost no trace of vitamin C.

Students Anna Devathasan and Jenny Suo tested the blackcurrant cordial against rival brands to test their hypothesis that cheaper brands were less healthy.

Instead, their tests found that the Ribena contained a tiny amount of vitamin C, while another brand's orange juice drink contained almost four times more.

"We thought we were doing it wrong. We thought we must have made a mistake," Anna told New Zealand's Weekend Herald. The girls were both 14 and students at Pakuranga College in Auckland when they did the experiment in 2004.

Given Ribena's advertising claims that "the blackcurrants in Ribena have four times the vitamin C of oranges", they were astonished and wrote to the manufacturers, GlaxoSmithKline (GSK). When they got no response, they phoned the company, but were given short shrift. "They didn't even really answer our questions. They just said it's the blackcurrants that have it, then they hung up," Jenny said...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/mar/27/schoolsworldwide.foodanddrink

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

1. I'm confused.

Did they make the claim that blackcurrants have more vitamin C? Or their drink has more vitamin C?

Because yeah, their drink is in clear plastic containers, and vitamin C quickly breaks down in solution when exposed to light.

[unblock]

7. perhaps they were trying to say that blackcurrants have more c, but they use little of it

never try to put anything past a huge corporation in the search for profit!

[Shandris]

2. No wai!

You mean to tell me that a huge multinational corporate conglomerate that specializes in medicines...was misleading people about the amount of healthiness in their health drinks?

Wow, never woulda seen that comin... :sarcasm:

Good on these girls, I'm glad the corporate filth had to 'call them in to thank them'. Priceless!

Relateda: "Oh, its the concentrated juice that has more Vitamin C." Well no kidding? So you mean like...concentrated...has more stuff in it than non-concentrated? :silly:

[Christa]

3. Tuesday 27 March 2007 nt

[charlie]

4. Well, that's twice in a week

I'm getting good at missing dates.

[John Q. Citizen]

5. Thank goddess this wasn't posted in LBN, eh? i must have missed this. I'm glad it's posted.

[cascadiance]

6. And we find this out FIVE YEARS after they first found this problem out in their experiment?

Sheez! Think of how many people might have had 5 years of Vitamin C deficiency if they were swallowing the crappy claims that company made about their product!

Thank god though the truth ultimately came out! Those girls earned some valuable resume points for their efforts!

[jmowreader]

8. How much blackcurrant is there in Ribena?

The blackcurrants in Ribena really do have four times the vitamin C of oranges (and they grow in really shitty weather, which is why they're so popular in England) but if Ribena contains five percent blackcurrant juice and 95 percent water/HFCS mix, there won't be very much vitamin C in Ribena at the factory. Couple that with, as someone pointed out upthread, vitamin C doesn't do well in clear bottles, and you see the problem.