Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Restaurants Smart Choices turns the labels
Posted by Carly M. Alaimo on Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 2:13 PM
Coca-Cola Co., Pepsi Co., Kraft Foods Inc., Kelloggs, and General Mills Inc. are participating in a national dietary program called Smart Choices, which will basically relocate all box and can labels to the front of the package in 2009 . The purpose? Our national dietitians believe this program will improve public health and simplify healthy decision-making at the supermarket. Here's a quote from the Associated Press article:
Consumers wanted to have the guesswork taken out of figuring out other key nutritional information, like calories and servings. Moving it to the front of the box allows people to make decisions more quickly.
WHAT?
Have we really strayed so far from kinetic motion that there has to be a national program (with big money invested, no doubt) to avoid turning over a box of frozen fish sticks to read the label? Furthermore, if there is so much "guesswork" involved label-reading, how is moving identical information from the back to the front going to help someone who can't read it in the first place?
I say do away with this "calories per serving" BS and just tell us the total amount of calories we are consuming. Inform us how fat our asses will be after scratching the bottom of a Cherry Garcia pint because the label read 100 calories per serving and we mistook it for the whole carton. Tell us it's really 8 billion calories, 2 billion from fat, and the inches it will add to our waistlines. That is public health regulation. And leave it on the back of the package, an extra turn of the wrist can't hurt.
(Photo from Wikimedia Commons)
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