Read ’em And Weep: Understanding Food Labelling

It is one thing to decide that you need to eat healthier. It’s a completely different story to figure out how you can do that. The science of food labelling is a balancing act between a company’s perceived right to “market” their product based on half-truths and deception and the public’s right to know what they are consuming. Government agencies, such as the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States, regulate the safety of the ingredients that go into foods, and they also set the standards for the type of labelling that appears on products.

Knowing exactly what is in our food should not be a negotiable right, but government regulations are often the result of warring pressures between consumer groups and lobbyists for very large, very rich companies whose mandates highlight sales rather than ethics.

The result is a labelling system that falls somewhere in between the consumer ideal (truth) and the capitalist ideal (sales). That means that government agencies make certain concessions to companies who wish to promote their products with catch-phrases like “lite” or “all-natural” let them do so with some slippage in accuracy.

Nutrition Facts
First, a few introductory words on the “Nutrition Facts” that you find on the labels of your food. The “Nutrition Facts” are mandated by government agencies and contain a certain amount of standard nutritional information: usually ingredients, serving size, and the nutrients that are found in the product (per serving).

The first thing to note is that the serving size does not necessarily include the entire contents of the package. Serving sizes are made to be uniform across product categories so that they are easier to compare. This means that if you have a package that contains 100g of a product, but the serving size is only for 25g, if you polish off the entire package, you’ll need to multiply all of the nutritional contents by 4 (e.g. if it’s 50 calories per serving, you actually consumed 200 calories).

Aside from the amount of nutrients like vitamins, fibre, carbohydrates, and fats, labels should also give you the percentage of your daily value (%DV). This tells you how much of the daily recommended intake of a certain nutrient that product provides.

Labelling fats has become increasingly specific as North America looks at its health problems and their connections to our high-fat diets. The amount of total fat should be broken down into saturated fats (from animal fats) and unsaturated fats (healthier fats that come from plants). Amount of trans fats—the unhealthiest fats of all!—should also be listed. In the United States, they have also started mandating that food manufacturers list what percentage of the calories in the product come from fat (one gram of fat equals 9 calories). A healthy balance in your diet takes about 40% of your calories from protein (1gram equals 4 calories), 30% from complex carbohydrates (1 gram equals 4 calories) and no more than 30% from good fats (unsaturated).

The final consideration in considering “Nutrition Facts” is the ingredients list. The harder it is to find and read the ingredients, the more important it is to do so. If the product is filled with healthy ingredients, the company will be promoting it, front and centre. Also, if the ingredients list is very long, then chances are there are a lot of additives and it has been extensively processed, which destroys all the good stuff your body needs.

While the ingredients list does not provide specific quantities of ingredients, it does list ingredients from the largest to the smallest amount (by weight), so if the first few ingredients are three kinds of sugar and a couple of additives, you can conclude that the nutritional quality of the product is low.

Jargon
While we are not all seeking to follow a super-strict diet of raw veggies and organic fruit, most people who want to eat well instinctively go for a lower-fat, reduced-calorie, lower sodium alternative if (all other things being equal) one is provided. The key to understanding food labels, however, is to recognize one basic truth: the main purpose of food labelling is marketing and sales, not transparency.

Let’s start with the biggest buzz words in nutrition and weight loss and their relationship to reality in the food-labelling world: fat and calories.

“Fat” is probably one of the scariest words in our health and body vocabulary today. Fat has been demonized, both in our food and in our bodies. There are different levels of labelling “fat” in food, as decided upon by governmental agencies and food company lobby groups. All of the definitions provided are “per serving size.” If you see a label with the words “fat free,” this means that the product has less than .5 grams of fat (per serving); “low fat” means 3 g of fat or less; and “reduced fat” means that it contains at least 25% less fat than the full-fat version of that company’s product.

“Calorie Content” is the other major buzz word for “healthy” labelling. If something is “calorie free,” it contains less than 5 calories (per serving); “low calorie” means 40 calories or less. The words “lite” or “light,” however, are a bit of a can of worms. “Lite” is a buzz word that really hit its peak in the 80s with the boom of the diet industry. In terms of food labelling, however, it can mean several different things: it can refer to calories if the product contains one third the calories of the full-calorie version of the product or it can refer to fat or sodium if the product contains no more than half that of the original. But here, the plot thickens: light can also simply refer to the colour of the food itself (soy sauce, for example).

Aside from free, low and reduced, there are some other words that companies slip in that might not mean what you think (or might be altogether meaningless!). For example, the term “wholesome” seems to refer to nutritional value. In reality, the official definition of that term, by FDA standards, is “fit for human consumption.” One would hope that’s not a selling point, but rather a basic standard for products meant for human consumption.

Another misnomer is “all-natural.” This does not mean organic. In the example of animal products, it does not speak to what the animal was fed, hormones it did or did not receive, or how it was raised. All this term means is that, in the processing of the food product, no artificial ingredient was administered or added.

It is difficult to navigate the marketing jargon that blankets the nutritional value (or lack thereof) on food packaging. We like to think that simple logic can be our guide, but much of the language used is counterintuitive to the truth. The first step to understanding labels is reading them every time you pick up a packaged food. Before long, with familiarity, you will begin to see through marketing jargon and see products for what they are and how they should fit into your dietary regime.

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