Since Walmart’s announcement last week that it will “reduce sodium by 25 percent, eliminate industrially added trans fats, and reduce added sugars by ten percent by 2015,” some experts on food policy and health are claiming this is a step in the right direction, an encouraging sign of progress. Still others think the jury’s out and it remains to be seen if the initiative will prove beneficial. From a nutrition perspective, I find both of these claims faulty. If we intend to take the obesity and diabetes epidemics seriously, and if we truly care about the abysmal state of health of the American people, we cannot put our faith in an empty Walmart promise that barely scratches the surface of our country’s food and health crisis.

Walmart is well aware that in order to stay ahead of the curve with effective marketing they’d better jump on the bandwagon of promoting “healthier” food options. And just as we have seen green washing in large corporations, now we are seeing health washing—it abounds these days: The new McDonalds commercial for a healthy oatmeal breakfast, Wendy’s French fries with real sea salt, and now Walmart’s claim that it will cut the amount of sugar and sodium in their processed foods and remove 300 trillion calories in their foods overall. This makes for good press coverage, but the truth is these goals are miniscule in the face of a toxic, processed food supply.

As Anna Lappe rightly points out in her Civil Eats article, this effort is actually irrelevant when considering that many of these foods already contain nearly twice the amount of sodium the CDC recommends we consume in an entire day. As for sugar, the AHA says that women should consume no more than six teaspoons of added sugar a day, and men no more than nine. Meanwhile, one, 12-ounce Coke contains eight teaspoons of added sugar; a 25 percent reduction would still amount to six teaspoons—the upper limit of how much sugar a woman should consume in an entire day.

Clearly these “changes” are intended for PR and marketing advantages. These kinds of so-called improvements to industrial foods are not helpful and have actually been shown to be counterproductive and harmful.

This move brings to mind the Snackwell effect–in which consumers, when presented with low-fat cookies, ate more than they would of normal cookies, thus increasing their overall caloric intake and sabotaging their efforts to lose weight. I worry that the new labels Walmart intends to put on packages of food with reduced amounts of sodium and sugar will have the same effect as customers load up on “healthy” foods that are free of trans-fats and lower in sodium or sugar. Why not eat two cans of soup or drink two sodas?

Expecting Walmart to make processed foods healthier is like asking Phillip Morris to make their cigarettes healthier.  Indeed, blurring the lines between what’s healthy and what’s not only hurts consumers more as it makes the job of finding healthy foods harder and more confusing. This is yet another example of the American Fast Food Syndrome but with a slightly different twist. This time, a corporation is trying to make its processed foods appear healthier and thus appeal to Americans on two fronts: they can eat processed food, participating in what’s considered the normal American diet, while also feeling better about eating these new “healthier” foods.