Why Learning to Read Food Labels Is Crucial for Better Health

Acquiring the skills for spotting dangerous ingredients amid a growing reliance on processed foods, may improve the health of Americans.

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Nutrition facts labels on the back of packaged foods became mandatory in 1990 although they haven’t slowed America’s appetite for unhealthy ingredients—even with an update in 2016 that required “added sugars” be noted with larger, bold fonts.

It may be easier for consumers to scan and gauge serving size and calories but that hasn’t changed eating habits. Chemically enhanced ingredients in our food, more consumption of that food, and little in the way of consumer education have come with growing disease rates, obesity, and food prices.

Meanwhile, some health advocates and organizations have taken matters into their own hands to educate consumers on flipping the package to the back and pinpointing concerning ingredients in order to make better dietary choices.

Chiropractor Eric Berg, who is normally found creating YouTube videos related to the benefits of a ketogenic diet, recently examined what he said ought to be the first step in eating more healthily—cutting out ultra-processed foods.

He passed out free booklets at the June Hack Your Health conference in Austin, Texas, and is encouraging a movement in which consumers help each other by sharing how to spot dangerous—sometimes “hidden”—ingredients on food labels.

Food Label Literacy

While data suggest food label reading may be quite low, particularly among young people, those who read them also appear to make healthier choices.

A study published in January in Nutrients that examined whether the use of nutrition facts labels coincided with healthy eating patterns among teenagers found those who read them tended to make more balanced and nutritious choices.

However, just 11 percent reported almost always or always reading labels, nearly 28 percent reported sometimes reading them, and 61 percent never or almost never read labels to make a food choice.

“Only a few published studies from the past two decades report the prevalence of nutrition label usage in the US,” the study noted, including one in 2005–2006 that found more than half of U.S. adults read nutrition labels and another reporting less than one-third of low-income adults read labels at home or in the store.

A survey of young adults ages 25 to 36 completed during 2015–2016 reported that 31.4 percent used nutrition facts labels frequently, with results higher among:

• Women
• Those with a higher education and income
• Those who regularly prepared food
• Those physically active
• Those overweight or trying to lose, gain, or maintain weight

Specifically, these consumers were looking at sugars, total calories, serving size, and ingredient list. Results were published in 2018 in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

“Nutrition facts label users consumed significantly more fruits, vegetables, and whole grains and fewer sugar-sweetened beverages, compared with non-users. Nutrition facts label users ate significantly more frequently at sit-down restaurants but less frequently at fast-food restaurants compared with nonusers,” according to the article.

Three S’s

Looking at labels, however, doesn’t always translate into understanding. Many people have become accustomed to spotting sugar and calorie content, but Mr. Berg explained that’s not enough information to make the best decision. Such tactics can make a bag of highly processed chips look like a “healthy choice,” despite being full of starch.

He decided to simplify the top three most dangerous hidden ingredients—found below the nutrition facts component of the label—in his brochure. They all start with S—starch, seed oil, and sugar.

“That makes up a tremendous amount of processed food,” Mr. Berg said. “We break down these words ... and then we show you all the hidden words they camouflage. You can’t really look at nutrition facts, because you can’t really tell.”

Starch can be identified on ingredient lists as:

• Modified corn starch
• Modified food starch
• Corn starch
• Maltodextrin
• Dextrin

Seed oil is also known as:

• Vegetable oil
• Corn oil
• Margarine

Sugar may also be listed as:

• Glucose/glucose syrup
• Corn syrup/high-fructose corn syrup
• Dextrose

“Is there any food that’s lower on the scale of disease? There’s nothing worse for you than ultra-processed foods,” Mr. Berg said. “We wanted to simplify this and use it to help people make changes. What we want to do is start a trend.”

The brochure can be downloaded on his website.

A Skill Slipping Through the Cracks

Haley Scheich is on a similar mission. Like most Americans, she never learned how to read food labels growing up.

She first realized that food could be the culprit behind her symptoms when she began practicing yoga and mindfulness. Later, when Ms. Scheich was pregnant with her first child, she went down what she calls the “rabbit hole” of food nutrition, researching individual ingredients she didn’t want to put into her body or her baby’s body.

“The reality is that most adults don’t learn this information until we are in our late 20s, early 30s. To me what’s most devastating is why aren’t we empowering our kids with this information, to learn differently about ultra-processed and real food at a young age so they can have that information for their whole lives?” she told The Epoch Times.

Ms. Scheich has taken on some of that education herself. She’s written a series of “My SuperHero Foods” books and has an Instagram account by the same name that aims to educate young children and parents to make better food choices.

She noted that many parents assume that anything found on grocery store shelves is safe to eat, making labels largely irrelevant and marketing language persuasively powerful.

“Parents are trusting the cereals that are saying, for example, ‘Heart-healthy’ or ‘Made with whole grains’ are really good for their kids,” she said. “What they don’t realize is these food labels are so misleading, backed by lots of different deep pockets. In the end, we are setting our kids up for chronic diseases that are plaguing our kids earlier in their lives.”

How We Can Be Misled

What consumers may not know is that claims such as “Made with whole grains” may only have a “pinch” of whole grains, according to a University of Michigan article.

Other common claims that are not defined or standardized on labels, the article noted, include:

• Contains no cholesterol—Often it had no cholesterol to begin with.
• Natural—This is strictly a marketing claim.
• Made with fruit—It may include a processed form of fruit.

Additionally, foodmakers can use many different forms of sugar in smaller amounts to avoid listing sugar as the first ingredient, according to the article. These, and other tactics, can make label reading more cumbersome.

A poll by consumer research company Attest discovered that only 9 percent of consumers could identify the healthiest snack bar from a handful of choices.

“Some masked a high sugar content; Nutri-Grain Soft Baked Strawberry Breakfast Bars, for example, were thought to be the healthiest choice by 12.5 percent of respondents, but contain 24 percent of the recommended daily sugar intake in a single bar,” according to Attest.

The same poll also found that 55 percent of consumers trust the brand names for information about whether products contain healthy ingredients.

Front-of-Packaging Label Changes

For its part, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is currently tackling front-of-packaging labeling, which is prime real estate for corporations to market their products with potentially baseless claims.

The proposed rule for front-of-package labeling is targeted for release this summer, an FDA spokesman told The Epoch Times in an email.

Legislation in 2023 directed the FDA to create the new label, which falls under a White House strategy to “end hunger and increase healthy eating and physical activity by 2030, so that fewer consumers experience diet-related diseases like Type 2 diabetes, obesity and hypertension,” according to the FDA.

Many other countries have adopted either voluntary or mandatory front-of-packaging labels, often incorporating the traffic-light colors of green, yellow, and red to indicate the benefits or harm of products.

However, U.S. focus groups noted confusion in using a color scheme, based on proposals that had red, yellow, and green color ratings for each category of fat, sodium, and sugar. That could result in one product having both red and green on its front label, compared to more simple labeling programs in other countries that have an overall score or star rating.

Other concerns were brought up by the food industry in comments companies and organizations filed online. One mentioned by Kellogg’s and others is how nutrient thresholds are set, meaning a serving size could be different for different people or the item could have vastly different ratings if judged as part of a meal with other foods that would dilute the harm.

“For example, cereal is also typically consumed not as an individual food but paired with milk and fruit,” Kellogg’s wrote in its letter to the FDA.

“This means that even though the cereal may have more than 5 percent daily value (current description of low) of added sugar, the overall meal could be low in added sugar. Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, the agency should set nutrient thresholds for individual food categories based on their differing serving sizes and its contribution to a dietary pattern.”

Moving Away From Caloric Debates

Front-of-product labeling that highlights sugar, salt, and fat is a move in the right direction, according to two doctors participating in the American Medical Association’s (AMA’s) “What Doctors Wish Patients Knew” series.

Front-of-packaging labels in the United States could help consumers who have been led to believe that calories are the most important factor on a food label. Calories derived from ultra-processed food provide different nutrition than whole food, family physician Dr. Neha Sachdev said in the article.

“It is important to highlight that calories are not all created equal,” said Dr. Sachdev, who is also director of health systems relationships at the AMA. “So the same calories that you might get from eating an apple, for example, are very different than the calories you might get from eating an apple fruit bar.

“These might be equivalent in number, but what ultra-processed calories represent and the nutrition that they provide your body is different,” she added.

‘The Stakes Are High’

Whole foods are always best, cardiologist Dr. Stephen Devries noted in the AMA article, because research shows those who consume the most ultra-processed food have a higher mortality rate.

“The stakes are high because ultraprocessed foods are so widely consumed. Recent data shows that 57% of caloric intake in adults comes from ultraprocessed foods,” said Dr. Devries, who is also executive director of the educational nonprofit Gaples Institute in Chicago. “For children, it’s sadly even higher, with 67% of children’s daily calories from relatively empty ultraprocessed foods.”

A 2023 study in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics noted a 10 percent increase in food additives since 2001, with 60 percent of American food containing ingredients such as artificial coloring and flavoring, preservatives, and sweeteners.

More than half of packaged food and beverage products purchased in 2019 in the United States had three or more additives. Additionally, the study found Americans had a 22 percent increase in ultra-processed baby food purchases.

“With manufacturers producing foods and beverages with an increasingly higher number of additives, it is more important than ever to understand what is in the foods that Americans are buying and eating,” the study’s senior investigator, Barry Popkin, said in a statement.