Nutrition Facts And Labeling

Does Nutrition Facts Labels Hide too Much?

We have had the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act around for almost 20 years now;
perhaps we never paid attention to how those labels came to be so comprehensive, and
who exactly mandates them. But there you have it. They need the food makers to not
just tell you what’s in their packages; they need them to give you enough information for you to
educate yourself to plan your nutrition and your food habits better . Well, we always
thought that the nutrition facts labels on the tens of bottles on the shelves seemed
simple and accessible enough for any regular consumer. But that’s what consumer advocacy
groups and NGOs are there for – to alert us to the rights that we were too shortsighted
to realize what we need and deserve. The consumer group Center for Science in the Public Interest
has its eye on the standard nutrition facts labels we’ve known and grown to
love for years, with the intent to make it more useful to people.

Their arguments are pretty meaningful, if you think about it. To begin with, when
any packaged food has high levels of fat, salt or sugar, if eating it would give you
more than a fifth of your daily required allowance, they want you to be able to see
a red danger warning with the word High next to it. All kinds of ingredients used
that perform the same function, they want you to be able to see in one place. If
some of that sugar mentioned earlier isn’t the natural stuff you recognize as sugar,
they want you to be able to see that the sweetener used in it is unnatural. If anything
in a packaged, processed food is supposed to be whole grain or unrefined, they demand the
label to say exactly how much, by percentage the unrefined stuff is. And of course,
if something contains caffeine, we just need to know about it, quantity and all. All
of this really should have been addressed the first time the government defined the
nutrition facts labels all those years ago. But then, here we are, still fighting
for our rights.

Obviously, of all this information would be not entirely useful if it
was given in the tiny squashed up print the manufacturers love to use. The new demands
include using bullets to list everything point by point, and to use capital letters
all through. Perhaps these demands don’t go far enough. It would be really
useful to ask them to mention how much of the fiber or the vitamin in the package,
is synthetically added. You would be forgiven for thinking that things were much
better when the food industry wasn’t so entirely automated and corporatized.
As far back as one can go, even in ancient England, bakers were up against the
throne to not have to answer to anyone what they put in their bread. And the
unspeakable conditions in the slaughter houses around the country in the 18th
and 19th centuries were what inspired Upton Sinclair to write The Jungle, and
that was what inspired the Inspection Act of the 20th century. Perhaps one day,
our nutrition facts labels will include all the information you would want
to have if only you knew these existed. For instance, there are all kinds of things
done to make inedible parts of animals seem edible – bones and cartilage, for
instance. Perhaps one day, we’ll find a way to force this information
on to the labels too.

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