Michelle Obama and FDA's New Food Labels: What to Know

[zenkai]

Doesnt matter to me. I aint gonna look at them anyway. It pisses me off though that this will cause another increase in cost of foods since the producers will need to redesign all their labels, pay for additional testing etc... Just so Mooshell Obama can climb up higher on her horse as she dictates how we should eat. These laws are stupid anyway as only about 5% of the population has ever read a nutrition label

- - - Updated - - -



Perhaps they should make the serving size more reasonable so that it actually fills a normal person instead of making them purposely small so they can say there is only 100 calories per serving. Nobody eats a half cup of cereal or most anything else for that matter

lol very true. I like those 100 calories bags of candy, who they hell are they kidding

[Orlong]

I agree - some serving sizes are so ridiculously small that they are obviously being used to promote the product (inaccurately) as being healthy.

This is especially true with condiments. Nobody only uses 1 tablespoon of salad dressing unless youre eating a salad with 3 bites in it. Most people, if they are eating a dinner sized salad are using a quarter cup or more of dressing on it, otherwise it wouldnt coat every piece of lettuce in the salad, and nobody uses only 1 tablesoon of mayonnaise for a decent sized sandwich

[Meldetia]

Yes, but more people comparing two things like that would care about total sugar. Thats why I dont understand the 'added sugar' part. The amount and daily % should be suffice. I really think the Food Industry is getting away with one by having the fat calories taken out and I know they are not going to agree to show the Total Fat Calorie % because some food is going to be 50% or more fat.

The total sugar is absolutely important but I find the added sugar information still helpful. I would consider something with 4g sugar per serving total with 1g of that added being more healthy than a similar item (and same serving size) with 4g total with 3g of that added. This again assumes that added sugars are worse then the naturally found ones.

And yeah I totally agree about the fat calories - more information is better and the number of calories that come with the fat is useful for showing just how much of a serving is fat. To get that information now you would need to know the number of calories per gram of fat and to do math - which goes against

"Very soon you will no longer need a microscope, a calculator or a degree in nutrition to figure out whether the food that you're buying is actually good for your kids, so that's a phenomenal achievement," Obama said.

although obviously not to that extreme.

[alexw]

It's still highly debated and I don't see how something manufactured is good for you http://www.cbsnews.com/news/sugar-hi...r-your-health/

Kavanagh said she's firmly in the camp that believes the source of sugar does matter, and that high-fructose corn syrup is worse than table sugar.

That's because the glucose and fructose contained in high-fructose corn syrup aren't chemically bonded, while the two are joined by a chemical bond in table sugar.

Umm the chemical bond in sugar is extremely easy to cleave. It happens in our stomachs in seconds. Its the free glucose/fructose that then gets absorbed.

So there isn't really any difference to our bodies between HFCS and sugar. HFCS is just a lot cheaper and so companies dump it into food products by the boatload because it costs them next to nothing to do so. That is the real problem. It is so cheap it is ubiquitous in everything and so people end up consuming vast amounts of it, whereas 30-40 years ago you would have a bit of sugar in a food that would be an occasional treat instead of in everything.

IMO this isn't going to change until food companies are forced to change. Tax the **** out of added sugars or something so its not profitable to dump it by the boatload into food. The nation is now made up of sugar addicts, and when have addicts ever given up their vice en mass? They are not going to give up their fix voluntarily so policies need to be implemented that leave them no choice.

[Selastan]

Damn that woman...If her husband got a third term we would have Surgeon General warnings on everything except two or three brands of carrots. Seriously, if people are worried about what they eat they read the label, if they aren't, they don't. What does this accomplish?

[Eviscero]

I'm all for informing the public about the fact that fat consumption had next to nothing too with obesity or heart disease, high cholesterol, etc. And that in fact sugars are primarily responsible for these health issues. But wtf is with "added sugar" ... Is that code for sugars not added via another ingredient that itself contains sugars? If so, that is moronic and abusable. The fatty sucking down an all fruit smoothie might as well just drink a soda after that 8 minute walk on the treadmill.

[Xar226]

So calories and serving size are bigger. Actual amounts of vitamins and minerals are listed. Added sugar is now listed. I dont get why people are bitching about this. It changes nothing except making labels more informative.

They changed which vitamins/minerals are listed as well, to coincide better with what Americans tend to be deficient in. I agree, it's a net positive.

It suggested that they would fix some of the idiotic serving size information in the article but it's hard to tell from the examples if it did. I actually ran into this nonsense last night looking at a bag of popcorn.



Look at how hard it is to figure out the amount of calories in a bag of popcorn. 2.5 servings per bag right? Nobody eats fucking unpopped popcorn so 2.5 x 30, simple! But wait, seems kind of low, hmm... oh wait, the serving size is four cups popped but they're giving you data for 1 cup. Okay, so 4 cups * 2.5 servings per bag = 10 servings per bag, times 30 for the bullshit information they give you, 300.

But why the fuck are they giving you unpopped information in the first place? And why does multiplying the unpopped number, equal to the serving size, by the number of servings per bag result in a different number? Is the answer 300 or 400? Or something else?

And more importantly: Why is it so difficult to calculate such a simple thing? Nobody is eating 1/10th of a bag of popcorn. Even if you're sharing with your family that's an unreasonable number. The only conclusion I can reach is that they are intentionally trying to conceal the answer.

I hope that crap is fixed with these new labels.

(Edit: In case it's not clear, this is microwave popcorn -- you literally can't make less than the entire bag at a time, which makes the numbers even less reasonable. Again, nobody is dividing a bag of popcorn into tenths. Maybe quarters or fifths if you can assume it's being shared among an entire family, certainly not fucking tenths.)

[alexw]

I'm all for informing the public about the fact that fat consumption had next to nothing too with obesity or heart disease, high cholesterol, etc. And that in fact sugars are primarily responsible for these health issues. But wtf is with "added sugar" ... Is that code for sugars not added via another ingredient that itself contains sugars? If so, that is moronic and abusable. The fatty sucking down an all fruit smoothie might as well just drink a soda after that 8 minute walk on the treadmill.

I think its a way of trying to pressure food manufacturers to reduce the sugars they add, with the federal gov being unwilling to say that is what they are doing because they don't want the hassle of the conservative loonies going loony over it - gov over-reach! muh freedums! - which is what would happen if they explicitly said that that is it what they are trying to do.

Foods often come with sugars naturally but with the added sugars bit it shows how much companies are adding on top. By making it extremely obvious to consumers how much is being added some people will go for lower added sugar alternatives thereby putting a bit (although not much) pressure on companies to add less sugar.

[Orlong]

They changed which vitamins/minerals are listed as well, to coincide better with what Americans tend to be deficient in. I agree, it's a net positive.

It suggested that they would fix some of the idiotic serving size information in the article but it's hard to tell from the examples if it did. I actually ran into this nonsense last night looking at a bag of popcorn.


Look at how hard it is to figure out the amount of calories in a bag of popcorn. 2.5 servings per bag right? Nobody eats fucking unpopped popcorn so 2.5 x 30, simple! But wait, seems kind of low, hmm... oh wait, the serving size is four cups popped but they're giving you data for 1 cup. Okay, so 4 cups * 2.5 servings per bag = 10 servings per bag, times 30 for the bullshit information they give you, 300.

But why the fuck are they giving you unpopped information in the first place? And why does multiplying the unpopped number, equal to the serving size, by the number of servings per bag result in a different number? Is the answer 300 or 400? Or something else?

And more importantly: Why is it so difficult to calculate such a simple thing? Nobody is eating 1/10th of a bag of popcorn. Even if you're sharing with your family that's an unreasonable number. The only conclusion I can reach is that they are intentionally trying to conceal the answer.

I hope that crap is fixed with these new labels.

(Edit: In case it's not clear, this is microwave popcorn -- you literally can't make less than the entire bag at a time, which makes the numbers even less reasonable. Again, nobody is dividing a bag of popcorn into tenths. Maybe quarters or fifths if you can assume it's being shared among an entire family, certainly not fucking tenths.)

They do the same thing with uncooked pasta and rice. Nobody I know of eats dry rock hard uncooked pasta or rice. Even if you give a shit about nutrition its to hard to understand