Understanding why nutrition labels became ubiquitous has to start with a brief history lesson. One of the reasons urban areas could grow so quickly in the mid-twentieth century was the increased availability of mass produced food. At the time, packaged foods and the concomitant ease of food shopping seemed like a wonder of the modern world.
However, the change in the types of food available to the masses also included diets largely consisting of processed foods, a completely new food group for people to eat. Medical data over time started to show the detrimental effects of manmade foods such as margarine and how the increased salt or sugar intake of processed foods has long term health effects. Regular foods don’t have the same ingredients, ease of digestibility or addictive quality of processed foods, and our bodies react very differently to these foods.
Once medicine brought to light the risks of processed food, government regulation moved in to try to slow down the exploding food industry. One result was the suggestion of dietary recommendations, the food pyramid (recently replaced by the food plate) and mandatory nutrition labels on packaged foods. Granted, the food industry lobbies have altered the government recommendations, yet there is still a component of the federal guidelines meant to inform and protect the population.
What the government regulators have struggled to incorporate is the drive for thinness and pressure of the diet and, more recently, exercise industries which use nutrition labels to their own advantage. The labels were meant to be guidelines that would help consumers recognize foods made with chemicals or with hidden calories from factory processing. Instead, labels and serving sizes enable people at the mercy of the drive for thinness to justify restricting their food intake and feel compelled to constantly diet.
The other confounding factor has the been the overemphasis of weight in the government regulation of food. The data about weight and health is very limited, yet diet and exercise industry representatives continue to help urge the public to be scared of weight gain even though chronic dieting is an equal if not more insidious aspect of modern life. Chronic dieting is the cornerstone of eating disorders, disordered eating and our collective obsession with weight and food as I explained in detail in a previous post.
The sole purpose of nutrition labels is to recognize foods as more or less processed and help people identify foods that are more real. In today’s world, it’s impossible to avoid some processed food and there is no evidence that eliminating all processed foods is necessary. The goal of a balanced diet is moderation and variety of all things.
However, there is no use in obsessively reading labels to determine how many macronutrients one eats in a day, a normal serving size or for calorie counting. The regulations around nutrition labels allow so much room for error that these data are useless for any individual dietary choices and only serve to confuse the true reason label became a federal regulation in the first place.
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