Mark Kleiman, a blogger on public affairs, says:
So the FDA has what might be called the “quacks like a duck” rule: if you’re going to claim some specific medical efficacy for your nutritional supplement or food product — that is, if you’re going to market it as if it were a pharmaceutical — then you have to make a showing of safety and efficacy. If it’s marketed as a drug, then its marketing is regulated as if it were drug marketing. Legally, a food sold as a treatment for a disease falls into the category of “drug.”
General Mills, which makes Cheerios, has been marketing it as an aid to lowering cholesterol. The claim is quite specific: “You can lower your cholesterol by 4 per cent in six weeks.” It’s true that oat bran has some cholesterol-lowering effect. It’s not true that eating Cheerios has been shown to be a safe and effective way of doing so, or that there’s FDA-standard evidence for the quantitative claim.
I’ve bolded what appears to be the crucial bit.
Appreciate this. I’ve posted to similar effect on my nascent blog, The Grouchy Musicologist: http://grouchymusicologist.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/20th-century-developments-in-orchestral-music-killed-orchestral-music/
Indeed, the aggravating nature of the offhanded comment you responded to was what got me off my butt to create said blog in the first place—there’ll be a lot more where that comes from, though. The same standards of rationality that we ask of everything else can apply to discourse surrounding music, even though that seems (incredibly) to be non-obvious to many otherwise very rational people.