Label literacy: how to read past the hype on food packaging

Don't I feel virtuous today! For breakfast, I ate a blueberry muffin and a big bowl of hearty, "wholesome" cereal. For lunch, I'm having "chunky" soup, a slice of "stone-ground" wheat bread and a few chips with "Great Multigrain Taste!" I may even allow myself oatmeal cookies made with real raisins, washed down with a Lemon Lime Lightning fruit juice--"Now with FruitForce[TM] Energy Releasing B Vitamins!"

Finally, baying eaten so sensibly during the daytime, I may just reward myself at dinner. I've earned it. I'll have a stir-fry but made with "fat-free" cooking spray. Maybe some "sugar-free" ice cream for dessert--rum raisin, for the raisins, which contain antioxidants that "can slow the effects of aging." Then, if I'm hungry late at night, I will microwave some "natural"-flavored popcorn and have a couple of "low-carb" beers.

You got a problem with that? Evidently, a lot of nutritionists do.

They say that the packaging on foods (and drinks) today has many consumers utterly bamboozled--and our bodies are suffering mightily for it. Slap a picture of a big juicy strawberry on a cereal box, and we think we're getting real fruit. Tell us that bread is made from "wheat flour" and that it's "fortified" with vitamins and minerals, and we think it's even better than the brand that "builds strong bodies 12 ways."

Imply that "reduced-calorie" cookies are good for us, and we'll pay more for them, even though we fully expect them not in taste as good. And if they're not as tasty as the junk we're used to, we'll snarf down more just to compensate for their lack of flavor. By the time we're done, we've consumed more calories than if we'd stuck with the high-fat, sugary concoctions we actually prefer.

Informational Riches

We're funny that way--also downright obtuse. Never in the history of the world has more solid information about the food we eat been readily available--much of it required by federal regulation (see "Can They Say That?," p. 68)--yet few of us take advantage of the informational riches literally at our fingertips. By law, food must carry labels that identify nutritional content and list ingredients in order of predominance. But most of us become so bedazzled by the explosion of colorful advertising on the front of a cereal box or bag of chips that we rarely bother to look at the back or sides of a package where the real information is.

"To know what's in a food and whether it's good for you, you have to look at the nutrition label and ingredient list," says Katherine Tallmadge, a registered dietitian in Washington, DC, author of Diet Simple, national spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association and VT's nutritionist. "They have to tell the truth on the 'Nutrition Facts' label. If the front of the carton says 'orange juice,' you want the first item on the ingredient list to say '100 percent orange juice.'"

Siren Song

The rest of the package, however, may present a siren song of exaggeration and innuendo in which the advertising industry has taken the power of suggestion to a new high--or low.

"The packaging can be confusing," Tallmadge says. "'Reduced-fat' doesn't mean 'low-fat.'"

Whole milk, Tallmadge explains, is 4 percent fat. "So even '2 percent' milk still contains 5 grams of fat per cup, half of which is artery-clogging saturated fat, which isn't much of a reduction, especially if you drink more than 1 cup per day. Put another way, with '2 percent' milk, you're still getting 45 out of 120 calories as fat." For low-fat milk, she says, get skim.

My "low-carb beer," says Lisa Young, PhD, RD, an adjunct assistant professor at New York University's School of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health in Manhattan, is the most ridiculous of all. "A low-carb beer may contain 1 gram less of carbohydrates than a regular beer," she explains. Because 1 gram of carbohydrates contains only 4 calories, your so-called "low-carb" beer may not eliminate very many carbohydrates or calories. "So there's very little gain in drinking a low-carb beer. But because it's 'low-carb,' people think they can drink more of it."

Calorie-Laden "Health" Foods

Looks can be deceiving. "Some breakfast foods that may look like health food are loaded with calories," Young warns. "A lot of supposedly healthful breads are white bread with brown coloring added. All bread is wheat bread because it's made from kernels of wheat. But unless the first ingredient on the ingredient list is '100 percent whole wheat,' you're getting white bread with stuff added to it, including color. 'Fortified' just means some of the iron and B vitamins that were lost when the wheat was bleached have been replaced."

Calcium and vitamin C are similarly added to "fruit drinks," which Young considers equally absurd. "They're putting stuff in sugared punch," she notes. "Parents who want children to have these nutrients should give them orange juice or milk."

Serving Sizes

Even technically accurate nutrition labels can mislead unless you know how to make them relevant to life as we know it. Caloric content is based on serving size, but serving sizes on nutrition labels are often smaller than you'd expect.

A serving size of ice cream is typically 1/2 cup, but there are ice cream scoops that hold more.

The most wildly unrealistic serving sizes may appear on cans of "fat-free" cooking sprays. "They can say it is 'fat-free' because the serving size is so small," Young says. "One serving is less than one spray, but a lot of people saturate the pan."

The serving size for cooking sprays can be tricky because it appears co defy, or confuse, the laws of physics. Here the space/time continuum is interrupted, as size is measured in terms of time. The serving size for the canola oil spray that I intended to use for my stir-fry, for example, is listed as 1/3 of a second, and it's hard to imagine anyone being able to depress the nozzle for so infinitesimal a fraction of time. The entire can contains more than 700 servings, which I am fully capable of depleting in one Saturday morning's stack of pancakes.

Breakfast cereal is always preferable to pancakes, right? Depends on how much of it you eat, and we often eat more than we think. A serving size of breakfast cereal generally ranges from 1/2 cup to 1 cup. "Nobody eats only one cup of cereal, no matter what the official serving size might be," Young says. "They pour until the bowl is and bowls are getting bigger. So are plates. Restaurants are serving larger portions on bigger plates, so we come to expect to eat more than we used to and take the expectations home with us."

Eating More

Brian Wansink, PhD, professor of marketing, nutritional science and agricultural economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and director of the university's Food & Brand Lab, finds that consumers who think they are eating an item that is good for them--by being "reduced-fat" or whatever--consume more calories than they otherwise would. "This is called compensation," Wansink says. "Not only do we think we will get the same number of calories, but we are also compensating for the 'lower-taste quality' we think we're getting.

"The dangerous thing about front package labels is that we take them too far," Wansink contends. "We infer way too many benefits to a product that states one." The danger of legitimate health claims is that they "almost always cause us to over-infer health benefits. They give a 'health halo' to food."

OK. I'm guilty as charged. Remember the menu back when this rant began? A single serving of the blueberry muffin was 1/3 of the muffin itself; the entire muffin carried 745 calories. A serving of "multigrain" chips was "about 10 chips," which meant there were 490 calories in the 3 1/2-ounce bag I devoured. The Lemon Lime Lightning (with "FruitForce [TM] Energy Releasing B Vitamins!") contained only 10 percent juice; most of it was water and sugar. The "sugar-free" ice cream contained maltitol, an alcohol sugar that contains carbohydrates and calories (see "Is It Really 'Sugar-Free?'," p. 70).

Wansink says we shouldn't obsess too much over our food choices, which is good in hear. "If we were so hyper-vigilant that we made no mistakes [about what we eat], we'd never get anything done," he says. What is important is knowing the basics, and then lightening up. Worrying about the myriad health claims, after all, is enough to drive you to drink--a big glass of 100 percent orange juice, of course, and definitely not a "low-carb" beer.

RELATED ARTICLE: Can they say that?

What marketers can and cannot say on food packaging is regulated by the National Labeling and Education Act, passed by Congress in 1990 and administered by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Under the law. the FDA must approve "health claims," which describe the role of a substance in a specific health-related condition. The FDA determines which claims have sufficient scientific support to warrant the assertion. "Structure/ function" claims, which critics regard as a loophole in the law, merely describe how a substance affects the human body or its functions and do not require FDA approval. "Dark chocolate enhances sexual arousal" is a structure/function claim. "Three grams of soluble fiber in oatmeal consumed daily as part of a diet low in cholesterol and saturated fat may help lower the risk of heart disease," is a health claim. To avoid confusion, remember this: The more specific the claim, the more likely it is backed by reputable research.

RELATED ARTICLE: Is it really "sugar-free"?

"Sugar-free" cookies, candies and other dessert items often contain sugar alcohol, found on many ingredient lists as sorbitol, mannitol, xylitol lactitol isomalt, maltitol and hydrogenated starch hydrolysates. Occurring naturally in fruits and vegetables, sugar alcohols are not as sweet as the sugar we are used to, but they are not, as marketers would have us believe, carbohydrate-free. Unlike artificial sweeteners such as saccharin aspartame and sucralose, Sugar alcohols ere not calorie-free, either. Sugar alcohols provide about 2.6 Calories per gram, compared to about 4 calories per gram from regular sugar. Sugar alcohols are converted to glucose more slowly than regular sugar and, the Yale-New Haven Hospital Nutrition Advisor reports, "don't cause sudden increases in blood sugar. This makes them popular among individuals with diabetes; however, their use is becoming more common by just about everyone. You may be consuming them and nor even know it."

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