NUTRITION WATCH

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Label Mania

Do we really need all those flashy labels to steer us toward healthier foods? Here’s what to look for.

Guide to Reading Labels

Supermarket shopping is one of my least favorite chores (though I’d gladly spend hours at a farmer’s market). I try to get in and out as quickly as possible. By sticking to the store’s perimeter, I can fill my cart with produce, fish, meat or poultry, dairy and bread and then hopefully head home. But lately, if I need to venture into the center aisles, I feel like I’m heading into the Wild West. I’m confronted with a cacophony of bright labels (usually green), luring me to products with terms like “Sensible Snacking,” “Smart Choices Made Easy” and “Eat Smart.”

Picking up a symbol-festooned bag of Lay’s baked potato crisps—whose first three ingredients are dehydrated potatoes, modified food starch and sugar—I question what makes them a “smarter” snack than one of the unadorned bananas sitting in my cart. I know the banana is a rich source of potassium and fiber, but would most shoppers know that?

While the labels and symbols are supposed to help make it easier to choose healthy foods, their sheer proliferation only creates more confusion. No wonder David Katz, M.D., director of the Prevention Research Center at Yale University’s School of Medicine, when interviewed by a reporter, suggested that it would be simpler to label junk food with a “scarlet J” instead.

Nutrition Sells
Why the label free-for-all? Food company execs know that up to 90 percent of the American population reads food labels at least some of the time. In one study, 83 percent of consumers said they consider nutrition “very” or “somewhat” important when they buy foods. In other words, nutrition sells. That’s why you’ll find manufacturers, including Kraft, Unilever, General Mills and PepsiCo (just to name a few), creating official-looking “healthy” symbols and plastering them on certain snacks, cereals, crackers and other foods. But as Kimberly Lord Stewart, author of Eating Between the Lines (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2007), notes, “the symbols are only as good as the criteria they choose.” Often, they don’t tell the whole story—highlighting a food’s healthful qualities while ignoring the less desirable ones. Take Kellogg’s Apple Jacks cereal: while bright banners tout that it’s low in fat, fortified with vitamins and minerals and an excellent source of iron, almost half of its calories come from sugar.

It’s not just food companies that play the label game. The Whole Grains Council, a nonprofit industry and science consortium, puts its “Whole Grain Stamps” on foods that provide a half or whole serving (16 grams) of whole grains. The American Heart Association has a heart “check mark” that appears on hundreds of food products that meet its criteria (and whose manufacturers pay a licensing fee; see “What Is This?” January/February 2007): no more than 3 grams fat (up to 1 gram saturated), 20 milligrams cholesterol and 480 mg sodium per serving, plus 10 percent or more of the daily value for protein, vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, iron or dietary fiber. Hannaford, a Northeast supermarket chain, has developed its own “Guiding Stars” food-rating formula that flags the healthiest foods with shelf tags (skim and 1% milk get three stars; 2% milk gets one star; whole milk gets none).

Simplify, Simplify
Simpler, more uniform labeling might be on the way—someday. Last November, the consumer watchdog group Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) petitioned the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to design a national set of easy-to-use symbols to help consumers quickly identify healthier foods. And Yale’s David Katz is already developing an Overall Nutrition Quality Index (ONQI) score to rank all foods for their nutrition and health value. “You shouldn’t need a Ph.D. in nutritional biochemistry to go supermarket shopping,” he says.

To see how such a system might work, we need only look across the pond. The Food Standards Agency, Britain’s FDA equivalent, is now phasing in a “traffic light” label system that rates foods with high (red light), medium (yellow light) or low (green light) symbols in four key nutrients: total and saturated fat, salt and sugar. The voluntary system was launched a year ago and a number of supermarket chains and food producers have signed on. Some, however, are resisting—and my friend Susan Jebb, Ph.D., who heads the Nutrition Communication group at the Human Nutrition Research Centre in Cambridge, England, suspects why. The label resisters, she says, are keenly aware of evidence that “consumers are less likely to buy a food whose package front is loaded with red spots.”

Ditching the usual “there are no bad foods” party line some dietitians adhere to, Jebb feels it is critical that consumers recognize “there are some foods they should eat less of.” She cites reports from British supermarkets that suggest the labels are inspiring healthy changes in customers’ purchasing habits. “The ‘traffic lights’ are engaging a whole group of people who previously weren’t thinking about what they were eating.”

Could such a system happen here? At the rate the FDA works, I wouldn’t count on the U.S. having uniform symbols on packaged foods anytime soon. But maybe that’s not so bad. Do we really want to have something so simplistic, since the symbols usually only make it onto packaged foods anyway? I don’t see fruits and vegetables—well-known keys to a healthy diet—sprouting labels.

In the meantime, when you navigate the supermarket aisles, remember that no healthy label can substitute for good sense. Know what ingredients to hunt down and what to limit in your diet (see our tips, right). Most important, don’t think you can eat more of something just because it’s labeled a “Sensible Solution.” That would be... well, senseless.