FDA Food-Label Stories

The New York Times' Well blog is a font of interesting and important stories. A recent post there concerns a new report from the Center for Science in the Public Interest highlighting the need for new food labels. The Center is quite right. Food labels, those useful little black boxes on the back of everything from candy bars to cereal boxes, can be wicked hard to understand. The information can be confusing, and down-right misleading.

For example, a common trick of food manufacturers, especially soda companies, is to break a product into more than one serving when they know full well everyone who purchases it finishes it in one gulp, so to speak. Consider the amount of sugar in a twenty-ounce bottle of Coke. The number on the label is per serving, not per bottle. There are at least 2.5 servings in a bottle. When was the last time you saved half a bottle of flat Coke for the next day? And then saved half of that for the day after?

The Well blog's post is a good one, but it seems to miss a bigger story. According to Fooducate, a fascinating blog run by a highly educated Bay Area dad who can't find sufficient information in order to make rational decisions about buying groceries, the FDA is actually soliciting comments from the public about changing the labels. If you follow the Fooducate story, you'll be led right to where you can tell the government how to help you. We have until January 19, 2010 do to so.

(By the way, there are 27 grams of sugar per serving in a bottle of Coke. 2.5 servings per bottle equaling 67.5 grams total. But what does a "gram of sugar" look like? There are 4.2 grams of sugar to a teaspoon. As the writer Frances Whittelsey points out, that works out to 16 teaspoons in one sitting. Sixteen! That's a lot of sugar.)