| As Tom Laskawy puts it: "Food Industry FAIL." Front-of-package nutrition labeling has long been tossed around as a way to help consumers better choose healthy foods. There are two bits of news out on this, and neither is good.
One (the one Laskawy refers to) is about a new Prevention Institute study of children's foods that identify themselves as healthy in front-of-package labeling. And the findings? "84% of products studied failed to meet basic nutritional standards." Oops. But not surprising. After all, it was marketers, not nutritionists, who decided which foods qualified as "healthy."
How about a more unbiased system, that merely tells consumers the vital stats about each product's nutrition? That's exactly the idea that the FDA has been kicking around, actually. There have been proposals for a red-yellow-green stoplight system (i.e. a product with a red light for fat or calories means "don't eat this") and the food companies did not like that idea. It was too, um, easy to understand.
Recall their last proposal, the Smart Choices "Froot Loops are healthy" (i.e. better for you than a doughnut) program. That was abandoned when it was met with well-deserved ridicule. So now the food industry has proposed "Nutrition Keys." You can see what Marion Nestle, the Center for Science in the Public Interest, and the blog Fooducate have to say about it at the links. The consensus: Nutrition Keys is no good. It's confusing, and consumers won't pay attention to it. (For the food companies proposing the labels, that, of course, is the point.) Nutrition Keys is just one more lame attempt to keep the FDA from mandating front-of-package labels that actually help consumers detect and bypass unhealthy foods. Let's hope it goes the way of Smart Choices quickly. And that the FDA takes action to get rid of the inaccurate health claims like the ones found in the Prevention Institute and to replace them with a front-of-package labeling system that works. How 'bout that traffic light system? |
