Study doesn’t go far enough in finding food-label claims misleading

Want to find out what’s in the food you’re eating? Here’s how

What caught your eye the last time you were in the supermarket that landed in your cart — even if it wasn’t on your list?

If you’re like a lot of shoppers, it probably turned out to be a product that said it was “low” in something, be it calories, sugar or fat.

But those claims may not be worth the paper they’re printed on.

A new study by a group of nutrition experts from the University of North Carolina found that those promises are tricking us into buying foods we wouldn’t typically touch with a ten-foot pole.

But there’s something else that’s even more important. Because when you really want to know what you’re serving yourself and your family, there’s only one place to look.

Let the buyer beware
When researchers analyzed the data on millions of processed food items purchased by over 40,000 families, they came to this conclusion: Shoppers are being misled by food-label claims.

And the biggest tricks in Big Food’s book just happen to be ones that call products low in salt, sugar, fat and calories.

While the FDA is supposed to regulate exactly what those words mean, food manufacturers get very creative in how they use them.

For example, according to Lindsey Smith Taillie, a Ph.D. and specialist in nutrition who led this current research, a product might say “low fat” on the front to catch your eye, but it’s also super-high in sugar. Or, a “low” claim might just be referencing that food against another product that wasn’t so healthy to begin with.

And I’ve noticed that if a food or drink says “low sugar,” it usually turns out to mean that it’s loaded with artificial sweeteners like aspartame.

As Taillie put it, “it can be kind of misleading to make a decision about a product” on statements like those.

But here’s where I part company with Taillie and many other nutrition experts. Because basically, they’re worrying (and studying) about the wrong things.

There’s only one place that will tell you about the food you’re planning to eat, and it isn’t the front of the package or even the nutrition facts label.

It’s the ingredient listing.

You know, that part on the back, often in tiny print that Big Food wishes would somehow go away.

That’s where you’ll find out if brain-damaging additives like MSG (or any of its aliases) are in that soup or frozen dinner. The ingredient list will tell you if the “sugar” content is coming from actual sugar, or the liver-destroying laboratory sweetener high fructose corn syrup.

You can also learn if the berries that look so great in the picture on the front of the cereal box are naturally red or colored with some cancer-causing artificial dye made from petroleum.

Actually, without taking a look at the ingredient listing you’re really just putting 100 percent trust in the food industry, which is probably worse than having faith in Big Pharma!

And why more dietitians aren’t telling us this is beyond me.

One, who commented on this new study, said that being able to decipher the nutrition facts label, or NFL, “is more important” than paying attention to marketing claims.

But that’s even more misleading — and soon, it will be worse.

One of the last big fiascos from the Obama presidency was Michele Obama’s makeover of the nutrition facts label.

As a result, a new section on the NFL called “added sugars” will soon be able to hide the presence of damaging sweeteners like HFCS in plain sight. And serving sizes will all be supersized, so if you’re eating normal portions it will be much harder to figure out what the calorie count might be.

And of course, this new NFL will come in a big font in bold letters so you can even read it without glasses on, unlike that more important ingredient label!

Look, I know that shopping is annoying enough without being bothered reading labels. But that’s exactly what the food industry is counting on.

And the consequences are just too high not to know what’s really in your food.

“‘Low content’ claims on food labels may confuse consumers” Shereen Lehman, March 24, 2017, Reuters, reuters.com