People should be able to go into a grocery store, look at the food label and be able to tell whether or not a food item is healthy.
Unless you have a degree in nutrition and a calculator on you at all times, nutrition labels on goods will always be overlooked.
The labeling system needs to be updated to better fit the way Americans consume food.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has proposed a new change in food labeling that could dramatically affect the way Americans eat, according to The New York Times.
The major changes to the nutrition labels on food packages include putting calorie amounts in large print and adjusting serving sizes to better reflect how much Americans really eat today.
This would be the first significant change in food labels since the government started requiring them in the early 1990s.
Even those nutrition labels that we still use today are based on eating habits and nutrition data from the 1970s and 1980s, also according to The New York Times.
Eating habits and diets have changed significantly since then, and labels on food need to be changed to better suit the twenty-first century.
Changing the way Americans look at nutrition labeling would dramatically change diets by lowering the risk of obesity and other health problems.
According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, one-third of adults are obese, as reported by Healthday.com.
By making adjustments to labels, more people would be aware of what they are consuming.
Having a separate line for manufactured sugars and other added substances that may lead to health problems would help people become more aware of what they’re eating.
Making print larger on labels would help make the nutritional facts more obvious.
For example, instead of labeling a bottle of soda as 2.5 servings, it could be labeled as one bottle per serving, thus making the confusion of serving sizes much simpler to understand.
Since the serving sizes on nutrition labels are usually in small print and put in a spot where they are not as noticeable, it would be beneficial for the consumer to put a whole bottle as one serving when looking at the other nutritional facts, so it can be interpreted in a more straightforward manner.
Millions of Americans pay attention to product identification, but that also means there are millions of Americans who do not.
Jacob Knehr can be contacted at jknehr@keene-equinox.com