We all want to make the right choices for our family, especially when it comes to the food we feed them. With headlines telling us about the increase in childhood disease like obesity and diabetes, parents everywhere are trying to do their best to protect their children from danger.
While some government agencies are helping to make it easier with mandatory nutrition labeling on restaurant menus, there's a gap where we spend the most money on food: the grocery store. A few grocers have implemented their own nutritional guides to help shoppers make educated choices, but they can still require interpretation and understanding beyond the few seconds we really want to spend reading a product label.
Earlier this year, a group of food manufacturers like Pepsi, Kraft and Kelloggs developed their own self-endorsed labeling program called Smart Choices that called out products that met their secret-formula standards to make these decisions easier for shoppers. Some of the Smart Choices include Fruit Loops, Lucky Charms, Diet Pepsi and Fudgesicles.
In defense of this labeling , Jeff Stier from the American Council on Science and Health (ACSH) wrote:
Froot Loops and Lucky Charms have the ‘Smart Choices’ label. They have sugar in them, but they also contain half of a person’s daily requirement of some vitamins. If we’re able to give kids those nutrients, it should be okay to give them some sugar. If they sold these products without sugar, kids wouldn’t eat them, or they might end up adding even more on their own….Don’t companies have the right to say those foods are better than others? It’s not as if they are making specific health claims, rather these are just comparative claims.
Does that help you feel better about the rationale behind this program?
On a related note, just this week there was a new study released from Yale University’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity indicating that cereals marketed directly to children have 85% more sugar, 65% less fiber and 60% more sodium than cereals marketed to adults.
And if you've got a young child at home, you're likely not surprised to learn that the industry spends a lot of money targeting young children with their advertising: $156 million on cereal TV advertising alone.
“The total amount of breakfast cereal marketing to children on television and computer screens, and at their eye-level in stores, combined with the appalling nutrient profile of the cereals most frequently marketed is staggering,” said Jennifer L. Harris, director of marketing initiatives at Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity.
The good news, for today, is that the Smart Choices program is halting operations and many of the food manufacturers are revising their packaging to pull the label from these formerly smart choice products.
What does this really mean for us consumers? Well, according to the American Society of Nutrition:
The FDA intends to develop standardized criteria on which future front-of-package (FOP) nutrition or shelf labeling will be based. In a letter captioned, “Guidance for Industry” and posted on its website, the FDA stated: “We want to work with the food industry − retailers and manufacturers alike − as well as nutrition and design experts and the Institute of Medicine, to develop an optimal, common approach to nutrition-related FOP and shelf labeling that all Americans can trust and use to build better diets and improve their health.”
And that's really good news for Americans today.
So, for now, we continue to read labels and do our best to make our own smart choices at the market.
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