As if reading food labels wasn’t hard enough

In a recent discussion I had with one of my weight loss clients the topic of reading food labels came up. As we talked I started to realize that this lady looked at the label on the side of the box of food as if it were gospel. This made me understand that I needed to do a little more research so I could educate my clients about reading labs.
The Federal Food and Drug Administration or FDA is the agency of the government that regulates how companies label their foods. Most people take it for granted that what the label says is what’s in the product. This is not the case however.
The FDA allows a whopping 20% lead way in the numbers that are reported on the label. This means if that Lean Cuisine you had for lunch was supposed to be 290 calories it might actually have been 348 calories and been perfectly fine by government labeling standards. I’m not really trying to run down the government regulators or the companies, because it’s not that easy to hit the numbers right on the head all the time. It is important to know this however if you are trying to count or monitor certain nutrients in your diet.
What do you need to know to help protect yourself? First of all you need to realize that the nutrition contents as they are reported on the label come from adding up the nutrients in the individual ingredients and not by testing the end product. So the more ingredients in a particular product, the more likelihood there is for error. Our Lean Cuisine might have 50 ingredients but a bag of carrots has one. Where do you think the error is more likely to be? Who do you think is more like to want to massage the number a little bit, the people selling the Lean Cuisine or the ones selling the carrots? Dropping the calories 20% might be quite a marketing boon for Lean Cuisine but it probably would be of little value to the carrots.
So what is my take way message? First, be more leery of food labels from products with lots of ingredients and foods that are marketed as being diet or lite. Second is to eat more whole fresh foods and you won’t have to worry about the labeling so much. A woman who is trying to maintain a 1500 calorie diet could be off by as much as 300 calories per day if everything she ate was mislabeled by 20%. This could cause a difference in her weight over the period of one year of as much as 31 pounds.
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