Do 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 for you to educate yourself to plan your nutrition and your food habits better by. 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 we 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.

And then, of course, 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.