A friend of the social media team recently started taking a medication that needs to be taken with 350 calories. It seems a little odd that a medication would come with a calorie requirement rather than simply telling a person to take it with food or take it with fat. But it’s written right on the medication bottle.
Food labels tell us more than calories. Very few people care just about calories, and calories only give us some of the information we need. But it can be hard to understand them. The FDA proposed new labels to make it easier to understand how much saturated fat, sodium and added sugars a food contains. The new front-of-packaging labels would highlight if the food has “low,” “medium” or “high” levels of the three nutrients and the Daily Value of each.
The label has yet to be approved. But, a study says it would only be effective if it were designed differently and only used on foods with high levels of one or more of the nutrients. Having the Daily Value included on the label confused people in the study because for some foods it’s a minimum, and for others it is a maximum. Removing that and sticking to the “low,” “medium” and “high” worked better. And using it only on food that had a “high” variable to call out made the labels pop more. If everything has a label, they became just white noise.
"It's so important that they pick the best design because the label will be seen daily by millions of Americans," said the study's corresponding author, Prof. Jennifer Falbe, of UC Davis. "Potentially everyone will see the label every day when they shop or grab food from their kitchen."
In the study, the researchers found that the best performing option was a black box with the warning “high in” and the nutrient. It clearly communicated the nature of the food and was visually arresting.
“A lot of people overconsume added sugars, sodium and saturated fat, so to be able to quickly see that ‘high-in’ label makes it very easy to say, ‘maybe I should avoid that today,’” said lead author Brittany Lemmon, a Ph.D. candidate.
Having an easily read label that people notice is essential. People make thousands of choices every single day. Making healthy food choices easier and more obvious is worth the effort, so people can make the best choices for themselves.
