Revised nutrition labeling isn’t enough to improve diets

The journal Health Affairs and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation recently published a policy brief about the latest federal Dietary Guidelines for Americans, introduced with this succinct observation: “Nutrition is a relatively young science and dispensing good nutritional advice to an entire population is not easy.” Understatement of the year. The new guidelines can practically be used as a measuring stick for how far from “optimal” eating most people’s day-to-day intake can be.

One major piece of advice is to “limit calories from added sugars and saturated fats and reduce sodium intake.”

Talk about a pie-in-the-sky recommendation. Limiting requires a baseline knowledge about such substances. But though nutrition facts labeling has been around for over 25 years, people still don’t really know how to read it or use it in meaningful ways that can make an impact on their health.

Because of this, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration is currently trying to revise the labels so they’ll be easier for consumers to read and more difficult for food marketers to trick people into believing they are eating less than they think.

The new labels would emphasize the number of servings per container and the calories per serving and would require the nutrition facts to be presented in serving sizes that stand a chance at meaning something to the average person — using, for instance, common household measures like a “cup” rather than the less-intuitive “ounces.”

Most importantly, new labeling would require that some food products that were previously labeled as more than one serving — like, for instance, a two-ounce bag of potato chips — be labeled as a single serving, because people typically eat or drink them in just one sitting.

And the labeling issue is just one tiny aspect of an overeating food culture that is almost exclusively defined, promoted and sold as gospel by food companies that regularly present their products as being “good for you” when they simply aren’t — unless limited to very infrequent indulgences.

But most food sins are committed on purpose. During a grocery-shopping trip last week I saw a teenage boy heading out of the store with what he referred to as “lunch” — a 16-ounce can of a popular energy drink and an 18-ounce bag of chocolate chip cookies.

What is the likelihood that he, in turn, will be able to pass on the tenets of basic nutrition to his own children? Highly unlikely in a country where public school cafeterias offer lunches that are federally mandated to include whole grains and fresh fruits and vegetables, and be low in saturated fat, trans fats and sodium — but are served alongside greasy pizza and fries with jumbo-sized sodas, cookies and chip bags available at the cash register.

The battle to improve food culture has made great strides in terms of getting consumers to want more locally sourced produce, fresher ingredients in their prepared and takeout foods, and even better treatment of the livestock that make up our dairy and meat products.

But the push for calorie restriction, serving-size control and curbing predatory junk food marketing is in its relative infancy.

It’s going to have to grow up quickly once enough people realize that increasing physical activity is a wonderful way to improve your physical well-being — but far from the most effective way to maintain a healthy weight or to provide the best nutrition for a disease-free body.

Only food holds that magical key to wellness. And until we find a way to give whole populations this basic understanding, the world will continue to have more people suffering from the diseases of obesity than from hunger.