How Accurate are Nutrition Labels?
Tuesday April 8, 2008
I saw an interesting piece on Good Morning America yesterday on the accuracy of food labels. They took 12 packaged foods such as bread, chips, and cookies, and tested them in the lab. They were shocked that the amounts of nutrients on the label often didn't match up exactly with what was in the food. They pointed out that the FDA allows a 20% fudge factor, which makes sense. If you take 20 samples of, for example, strawberries, you are going to get a range of differences between the samples when it comes to carbs, calories, and almost everything else. Sometimes they are going to be even more than 20% off - one was 70% off on one nutrient. The piece called them "diet damaging nutrients" -- a bit overblown, but the bottom line is clear: we really can't know the exact amount of any nutrient, including carbs, in a lot of foods.
One thing pointed out in the story is that if a label says the food does not contain a nutrient, such as the label "No Trans Fats", it means that there are no trans fats in the product. However, if the nutrition label says there is zero grams of a nutrient, it can have small amounts -- up to half a gram per serving. If the servings are small enough and you eat enough of them, those zeros can add up to something not even close to zero. So, odd as it may seem, "No Trans Fats" is not the same is "Zero Trans Fats". Go figure! What this means is that we have to look at the ingredients to tell us the whole story.
Photo © C. Sherburne/Getty Images
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So how can you know which companies to trust? For example, I just found these tortillas by La Tortilla Factory that claim to have only 50 calories per tortilla… how can this be, when the ingredients are the same as other tortillas that have twice that many calories and aren’t any bigger? Should I be wary of the 50-cal claim?
I know of so many other incidences where the company lied/gave out wrong nutrition info, and the actual calories turned out to be tons higher than it had stated on the label– Dr. Praeger Burgers, Nutritious Creations bars, Nana’s cookies, Celentano frozen meals, etc.
How can you know what labls to trust?!
Nutritious Creations TOTALLY lie about the calories in their cookies. They are double what they say they are.
I inquired about Nutritious creations nutritional reports and recieved a responce right away…their errors are from 2005 and were not on their low carb products they were on low fat products…this was overplayed by the press their products are totally legit!