Putting nutritional information on food is a great way to help people make healthier choices. New legislation in the US means that chain restuarants are now obliged to provide this informationl, and many have done it voluntarily already. But the next question is: how accurate is the information? It's a question I started asking myself 10 years ago, when I was working on the drive-through at McDonalds, and idly flicking through the nutrition pamphlet. During a lull in traffic, I divided the amount of fat in a box if fries by the total mass of the fries... and found that large fries were listed as having a different percentage of fat than small fries. Um, what? Perhaps that one was a typo, and McD's information looks pretty good now, but there are loads of other ways in which labels can mislead us. For example, I was delighted to find that a pot of my favourite yoghurt was a light 500kJ (120Cal), until I realised that that was per serving, and the pot contained two servings. Seriously? Who would pull the foil off, eat the top part with the crunchy toppings, and save the bottom half for later?
This video shows how bad the labelling accuracy was in a random sample of US food, and asks the question... who is checking up on the labellers? In some cases it's high school chemistry students, for example the 14-year-olds who showed that Ribena didn't contain the vitamin C it claimed. If you test a sample and find that the labelling is wrong, you can make a complaint about false advertising, but it seems that other than that there is little guarantee on the quality of information. Govornment funding for independent random testing is probably never going to emerge, but perhaps food manufacturers could be obliged to have their testing done by labs that are held to high standards, like they do in pharmaceutical industry. That kind of actual testing of food is not required, at least not in Australia and New Zealand, where manufacturers can just estimate their product's nutritional content using an online database of ingredients. Because this online calculator can't account for different seasons and batches of ingredients, it's not surprising that companies often get it wrong, and you can end up eating more than you bargained for. Because the numbers on the labels look so specific, with thier reassuring decimal points, it's tempting to think that you rely on them to calculate your daily 'food budget' down to each snack, but that probably isn't the case.
Nutritional information needs to be accurate, but it also needs to be intuitive. Educated consumers are already making use of the nutritional labels available on the back of packs in Australia, the US and other countries, but the next challenge is how to make that information super easy for less determined consumers. In the US, serving size is expressed in household measurements like tablespoons, which is supposed to be simpler than the grams used in the Australian standard (reference). But it means some serious mental arithmetic is required to figure out the healthier choice if two products, and if there's one thing most people don't want to do when they're hungry, it's serious mental arithmetic. Front-of-pack labelling has got a lot of support from researchers, but at the moment there are a lot of different ideas on how to make it simple. One novel study showed that the number of minutes you would have to walk to burn off some food was even more effective than the energy information. Let's hope we see more of this kind of research, because there's no point telling people to eat healthy if they can't actually identify healthy food.
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