Food Labels – are they wrong?
Wednesday, March 24, 2010 13:13Posted in category Making the news
A recent newspaper article reported that “food labels are wrong” because the calories listed do not account for the amount of energy used to chew and digest the food and are therefore overestimated. But does it really matter? Simply stating that a food has 20 less calories is hardly going to improve our obesity problem – it just gives people an excuse to eat even more! And anyway of the people that read labels, how many actually understand them?! The food label debate isn’t going away with some suggesting NZ should adopt a traffic light system but I can’t see food manufactures agreeing to that – who’s going to want to put red dots on their product!?!
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Richard Parry says:
March 25th, 2010 at 6:25 pm
This is full of fail. I want to know what’s in the thing I’m buying, not get someone’s calorie-adjusted expectation of how my body’s going to burn it. Just give me the facts and I’ll use those – don’t try and interpret those facts for me. There’s a lot of existing literature designed to do just that, and services (such as yours) around modelling those into some kind of eating plan.
I agree with you – rather than some flawed attempt to work out how much energy is consumed by the consumption process, why not provide people some education on exactly what they can do with the 1000kJ they just ate and what that really means?