‘Clean eating’ labels can distract from real change
Food industry trend toward ‘naturalness’ not a guarantee of healthier packaged snacks
What happens when you take the artificial colours, flavours and preservatives out of Pillsbury slice-and-bake chocolate chip cookies?
You have a revolt on your hands, that’s what. From the moderate, “definitely not a huge fan of the new recipe,” to the immoderate, “Horrible ugghhhh I’m sooooooo disappointed,” the reviews on Pillsbury’s website gave new meaning to “cookie pan.”
In reformulating the cookie dough recipe, Pillsbury was on trend. “Clean eating” is the new black, the new kale, the new new-thing. A recent survey from the International Food Information Council (IFIC), an industry group that researches buying habits, found that 61 per cent of consumers say recognizing ingredients on packaged foods is important to their purchase decision.
The key question is whether those reformulated foods are really any better for you. In the main, they are not.
That doesn’t mean all additives are guaranteed to be safe or that the evaluation process is as robust and transparent as it should be. It just means that focusing on “naturalness” is a lousy way to reduce risk, because plenty of artificial ingredients are harmless and plenty of natural ones aren’t.
A report issued earlier this year by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) identifies some artificial ingredients that pose risks (among them some artificial colours and preservatives), and report author Lisa Lefferts told me, “We’re glad to see companies get rid of some additives that have a questionable safety record.” But the report concludes that most additives are safe and “the biggest risks are from the foods themselves, not the additives,” according to Lefferts, who lists salt, sugar, saturated fat and a lack of fibre and nutrients as larger problems.
Let’s be clear: People disagree about additives. It’s easy to find experts who think they’re either more or less dangerous than CSPI says. But in my two decades of reporting on nutrition, I have found a lot of support for the idea that, on the list of foodrelated risks, additives rank pretty low.
OK, so clean labels may not be doing any good. But are they doing harm?
They very well might be. Several things happen as a result of clean labels and none are any good.
First is the danger that the clean versions of foods that aren’t any more healthful than their originals are nevertheless viewed as better for you. There’s a large body of research on what consumers do with foods that have a health halo: They eat more of them.
Remember Snackwells? If consumers perceive Kraft Macaroni & Cheese Dinner as better for their children when it’s coloured with turmeric and consumption inches up, that’s not a public health win.
But even if they don’t lead to more processed food in our diet, the rush to clean up labels hurts us because it’s a big, hairy distraction. It’s a distraction for eaters, who feel as though they can check the box “doing something about my diet” and move on to the next thing, but it’s an even bigger distraction for the companies doing the reformulating.
Ultimately, we will get the food supply we demand. Too bad we are squandering that power by demanding clean labels.