Side Dip

The truth is, people have grown used to seeing nutrition labels for so long, they fade into ambient noise noise. To have them occupy a prominent new location on the front of any package, it is going to start people thinking about what they are eating, in some cases, for the first time. It could actually bring more confusion than clarity into the arena.

Let’s look at a very common offender in our struggles with food: the standard bag of potato chips. One standard nutrition label is on potato chip bags; you will often find something like 150 calories listed per serving. A serving of potato chips turns out to be no more than ten chips; as if anyone could stop at ten. Any normal person would eat at least 50 chips at one sitting watching a movie. That would easily add up to 750 calories. Nutritional labels were invented to help us gain a handle on our food portions; but the way the serving sizes are measured today, the help really doesn’t mean anything. The FDA is certainly going to get manufacturers to redefine serving sizes, but it isn’t going to force manufacturers to put their nutrition labels out front. What it will do, is to make sure that they don’t labels things in such a way that the good gets pushed out front and covers up for the bad.

Nutrition labels today, have serving size mixups that would even flummox a diet expert. A serving of ice cream is half a cup. A serving of Oreos would be one ounce. A serving of cornflakes would be something more than a half cup. How is anyone to know what they call a serving, for each kind of food? The FDA hopes that listing larger serving sizes, won’t be taken by the public as a message that eating more is fine by the health experts. If that is the message people come away with after all this trouble, what hope is there?