The video isn't online, but a friend recently emailed me about the newest Pop Tarts commercial, which pushes Pop Tarts ice cream sandwiches to kids.  People, this is insane!  

I'm already annoyed at Kellogg for pushing Pop Tarts as a breakfast food.  They are marketed as breakfast, sold in the cereal aisle, the whole thing.  Surely this is the greatest marketing anti-nutritional coup of the past few decades, second only to Cookie Crisp cereal.  Walk down the breakfast food aisle and you'll find a panoply of Pop Tarts and Pop Tarts clones, right there alongside the oatmeal and granola.  What's next?  Snickers as a "breakfast bar"?

In order to stay healthy, an average kid between four and eight years old should be getting between 1200 to 1400 calories per day.  Frosted Brown Sugar Cinnamon Pop Tarts (my personal favorite) have 210 calories per serving size - that's per pastry - with two pastries per foil packet.  So 420 calories for two Pop Tarts, or about a third of the kid's calories for the ENTIRE DAY.

That's not breakfast.  That's a calorie bomb.

Make it an ice cream sandwich for an afternoon snack, as the commercial suggests, and the kid is cramming down about 600 calories.  That's half the kid's daily allowance of calories in one fell swoop!

Now I agree, the idea of a Pop Tart ice cream sandwich is pretty ****ing delicious, and I wish I'd never heard about it, because I can't stop thinking about how delicious that would be.  In a horrifying calorie bomb kind of way.

I've made ice cream sandwiches out of graham crackers before.  Which were pretty darned good, don't get me wrong.  But sandwiching ice cream with Pop Tarts is just taking it to a whole new level.

A more reasonable choice as a special dessert - for a birthday party, say - can be found on the Pop Tarts website.  I turned this up while digging around looking for their commercial.  If you made an ice cream sandwich out of a pair of Pop  Tarts AND THEN YOU CUT IT INTO QUARTERS, and rolled the edges in pretty sprinkles, you'd have something around 150 calories.  Even less if you use a low-calorie ice cream alternative.  (Come on, you're going to wedge it in between Pop Tarts - it's not like the kids are going to notice it's actually nonfat frozen yogurt!)

150 calories is much more in the realm of a snack.  Heck, you could carve up something like this as dessert for the family, one quarter for each person.  That's reasonable.

Two Pop Tarts and a scoop of ice cream for ONE CHILD, however, is not reasonable.  Although it is an excellent example of what's undermining our efforts to teach kids to make sensible eating choices.  And an even better example of the kind of horrific things that marketers aim at children, knowing that the temper tantrum is an excellent leverage for purchasing power.

For what it's worth, a lot of bloggers have tried out their own Pop Tart ice cream sandwiches.  By all accounts, it IS delicious, but a bit much, even for a grown adult.

Creative Commons-licensed image courtesy of Flickr user poolie