Food labels

It's an old blog entry (from early August 2011), but Anahad O'Connor's piece on serving sizes is still worth reading if you haven't thought much about how food labels can mislead.

Manufacturers of processed foods have to list the amounts of fat (generally broken down further into specific kinds of fat), cholesterol, sodium, protein, and a number of other -- what does one call them, "characteristics"? -- of their products. The nutritional facts are always listed on a per-serving basis, and therein is the rub: the manufacturer gets to decide what size a serving is. Naturally, the way to make your not terribly healthful product look better is to make the serving size as small as you can. Critics have been after the Food and Drug Administration for years to require manufacturers to use more realistic serving sizes in their calculations. O'Connor's piece reported on findings by the Center for Science in the Public Interest that highlighted the "worst offenders" in misleading food labels.

Perhaps I'm getting more reactionary as I get older, but it seems like forcing the FDA to mandate more realistic portion sizes is merely letting Americans get lazier and dumber.

I've been reading food labels for years. It didn't take long for me to figure out that no matter what the label called a "portion", I knew how much of that bag of chips I was going to eat. Eight, ten, or twelve "portions" in that "supersized" bag? Uh, that depends on how hungry I am. And as for canned soups, one of the categories specially called out on CSPI's list of worst offenders, I know I'm not going to eat just half a can: I'm going to eat the whole thing.

For years, then, I've been doing mental arithmetic in the store aisles to calculate just how much sodium and saturated fat I would actually be taking in if I picked up one of these products. It hasn't been hard, and if it had been, I'd have carried a cheap pocket calculator.

Forcing companies to change what constitutes a "portion" of their products isn't going to make people look at the labels if they aren't already doing so. The information is already there for the reading, and has been for years.

(Well, most of the information, anyway. The one change I would favor is for manufacturers to disclose the per-container totals for items whose per-serving percentage is zero, because manufacturers are allowed to round down to zero.)

I understand the impulse to compel reporting more "realistic" portion sizes. But it's pointless: your portion is not my portion, and the manufacturer's idea may not match either of ours. Besides, this is an area where I think consumers have to take some responsibility. If we're not going to think even a little about how much we're eating and how much fat (or sodium, or protein, or ...) we're taking in as a result, the companies selling us our foodstuffs aren't responsible for what happens to us. There's a point past which "help" becomes "coddling".