Posts Tagged ‘food labeling’
“Smart Choices” Program is Not So Smart
Wouldn’t it be nice if you could go to the store and know exactly which foods are healthy for you and which aren’t? That’s the idea behind recent “stamps of nutrition approval” you’ve seen popping up all over food packages lately. For instance, the Best Life Diet has a symbol they place on a number of foods they have approved. Food manufacturers have also been making their own “good nutrition choice” type stamps.
In an effort to circumvent the confusion that has arisen from this plethora of symbols, an organization called the Keystone Center has brought together a veritable Who’s Who of food manufacturers (General Mills, Coca-Cola, ConAgra Foods, Kellogg, Kraft, Pepsico, Unilever, and Wal-Mart to name a few) to work with a panel of food and nutrition experts and government agencies to create a new food labeling program called Smart Choices. Foods would carry a “single trusted symbol” representing healthy food choices at the grocery store.1
There are some positives to the Smart Choices program. For instance, on packaged and processed foods, the label will require calories per serving to be listed on the front of the package along with the number of servings in the package. That’s a good start, but in reality, the idea is better than the actual implementation, for a number of reasons.
