Food labels provide everything we need and want to know about our food…or do they?
Food labeling has come a long way. Ingredients are listed, and amounts of substances of interest to consumers must be reported accurately – calories, fat, carbs, sugars, sodium, and some vitamins and minerals. But there’s still plenty of wiggle room for food manufacturers, and the more information you have about labeling, the better your food choices are likely to be.
When no labels are better than labels
As useful as food product labels are, often the best foods are those that have, or need, no labels – for example, fresh produce, dried beans, brown rice or other grains, and anything homemade. But in the real world, most of us buy foods that need and thus have labels.
Looking at a typical food label
Typically, a food label has marketing information on the front and the ingredients and legally required information on the back. The marketing information often includes whatever buzzwords are currently in favor – natural, low fat, gluten free, no sugar added, contains expensive-tropical-berry-of-the-month. Many of these buzzwords are geared towards a population that is increasingly health conscious, which probably includes you.
How honest are food labels?
You might think that food labels are honest, if only because of governmental requirements. But food manufacturers have three primary goals:
- Sell as much product as possible
- Make it as cheaply as possible
- Comply with government labeling regulations
These three goals are, in many ways, mutually exclusive. Making food as cheaply as possible often involves using less healthy or even toxic ingredients. Selling as much product as possible includes the idea of not turning the customer off, and yet government labeling requirements mean that label information must be honest. Reconciling these three often leads to labeling practices that can be, well, creative.
Because of this conflict of interest and the resulting labeling, some awareness and even a bit of cynicism are in order.
Creative spellings
Creative spellings are a common dodge. If a label says the food is, or contains, fruit, cheese, crab, cream, or chicken, it must indeed contain these things. But if the label calls the product froot, cheez, krab, crème, or chik’n, the product can be whatever the food scientists can dream up. Yes, it sounds yummy and healthy, and might be accompanied by a photograph of the food being copied, but don’t be fooled.
Organic and natural
These are three words that often crop up on labels, both front and back. Organic is strictly and legally defined and so there isn’t much room for fudging the facts. However, there’s a difference between “contains organic ingredients” and “100% organic ingredients”; the former usually means that only some of the ingredients are organic, not all of them.
Unlike organic, the word natural on a food label has no legal meaning. If it comes from nature, no matter how many processing steps ago, it is, technically, natural, but that can be misleading.
Natural vs. artificial
Ingredient labels often say natural or artificial flavors and colors. Natural flavors and colors should come from nature rather than from a laboratory, but these might not be from nature as you envision it. For example, a label might have the picture of, and word, “strawberry” prominently displayed on the front. The ingredients label says it contains natural flavors. You might assume that strawberries were involved in making this natural strawberry flavor, but there are other, cheaper, natural plant and even animal sources of such flavors.
Natural colors sound better than artificial colors, but there’s a red color that is commonly used in food that comes from crushed bugs (cochineal). Chemical food flavors and colors start to sound better by comparison.
Order of ingredients
Ingredients must be listed in order by weight or volume. The more of the ingredient is in the product, the closer that ingredient is to the top of the list. But there are ways to get around this. For example, sugars are considered to be not healthy, and sugar might be the main ingredient in a product. So manufacturers might use several kinds of sugar such that none of them individually is within the first few ingredients.
Also, some harmful ingredients such as certain preservatives or additives can be harmful even in tiny amounts, so don’t be fooled by their inclusion towards the end of the list.
Euphemisms
A euphemism is a nice-sounding word that replaces what is really meant. Evaporated cane juice is a euphemism for sugar that often shows up on labels of foods marketed to the health-conscious consumer. MSG is a neurotoxin that cheaply increases the perception of flavor, but as people become more aware of it and its toxicity, food manufacturers have called it something else, such as glutamate, hydrolyzed vegetable protein, textured protein, or yeast extract.
Desirable ingredients
The front of the label might say “made with olive oil” or “balsamic dressing” or “contains honey.” A closer look at the ingredients list – which, remember, must list ingredients in descending order of inclusion – might show that, although the named ingredient is on the list, it is listed after cheaper oils, vinegars, or sweeteners.
Serving sizes
Food labels must list the calories, carbs, and fats per serving, but manufacturers can define a serving however they want as long as the numbers are accurate per their self-defined serving. A smallish bag of chips, for example, which is usually eaten in one sitting, might contain several servings and even partial servings, such as 2½ servings. A frozen dinner in a single tray might be said to contain two servings. After the serving size is, however unrealistically, defined, the front of the label can trumpet “only 300 calories per serving.”
Fats and oils
Labels must list amounts of fat and oil, and the percentage of calories from these, but they don’t distinguish between healthy fats and oils and their unhealthy counterparts, nor do they say how the oils are processed; heating can turn oil from healthy to toxic. At least many labels now quantify trans fats. They can say zero trans fat if there is less than a certain amount per serving, but these small amounts can add up over multiple servings and several kinds of food per day.
Buzzwords
Advertising buzzwords are words and phrases that address the concern or miracle food – usually exotic and expensive – of the moment.
What is eliminated or reduced gets as much label advertising space as exotic ingredients. Nonfat, low carb, no trans fat, low calorie, no cholesterol – these are promoted even if the serving size needs to be reduced unreasonably to make these claims.
Such is the power of these marketing phrases that even foods that never contained gluten, fat, or cholesterol in the first place are labeled as being free of these things.
Here’s an example of carrying this to extremes: a certain health-food-store dishwashing liquid – yes, dishwashing liquid – is labeled as being gluten free.
Buyer beware
Keep in mind that food manufacturers don’t have your health as their primary goal, and be aware. Read labels carefully and with a bit of skepticism.
