Food Label Changes

Food Label Changes

The FDA is planning on overhauling the labeling of foods, so that you, the consumer, can know how much you're really eating. Right now, the food labels are deceiving, and you may be thinking you're taking in fewer calories and carbs than you really are. If you look on a food label, the key is the number of servings to understand what you're really taking in. Serving sizes come in varying shapes and sizes, and right now, food labels are deceiving, which may be part of the reason America has such an obesity problem.

Dr. Xavier Pi-Sunyer, an obesity researcher at St. Luke's Hospital in New York, says, "I believe the nutritional labels that we have now can be very misleading for some people. I think that they don't realize what a serving is." Most people don't take the time to look at a food label and see how many calories, fat grams and carbohydrates they're taking in. But even if they do, do they look for the number of servings per container?

For example, a box of cookies may contain four servings, so when the food label says 160 calories per serving that means, there are 640 calories in the entire box. Whatever is in the calorie line of the food label, you need to multiply it by the number of servings to get the total calories in the entire package. If it sounds confusing to you, the Food and Drug Administration believes it is as well. This is why it is considering introducing a requirement that food manufacturers add a line on food labels that says "As Packaged."

In other words, the food label would tell you the total calories contained in that one package. While the FDA would not comment on the issue, industry insiders believe it will make a decision in the coming year. The FDA is also considering urging restaurants to voluntarily provide calorie and nutrition information, as well as kick-starting more drug development in the anti-obesity arena. All of this is in response to the fattening of America.

"I think that is very important to get appropriate information out to the public. My sense of it is that the public doesn't really understand how many calories they're eating a day. Therefore it is very difficult for them to make appropriate decisions on what they should or shouldn't eat, or how much they should or shouldn't eat." says Dr. Sunyer. So be careful with the muffin that has 12 fat grams on the label, because it has three servings in it, and so it has in total 36 grams of fat.