Foods that bear the Smart Choice label. courtesy of NY Times
Let’s face it. People in America, in large part, have a major attention deficit. Whether it’s their politics, clothes, religion, entertainment, etc., most people want the easiest most simplified answer or choice boiled down for them into a one-phrase sound-byte or an all-encompassing non-desrcript label/option. Nowhere can this be seen more than in how many people view, or rather don’t want to view, their food.
With the prevalence and popularity of unhealthy/processed foods and unhealthy food establishments (fast food), it comes as no surprise that the vast majority of people who frequently consume this food often times want to know little more than its price. But for those people actually looking for healthy choices amongst unhealthy foods (yes; that’s what is known as a contradiction), that pesky and easy-to-read nutritional label may be just too long and boring to capture the attention of the American consumer long enough to properly inform him or her before his or her purchase decision.
Diseased Industry In Nutritionist Clothing
Enter the Smart Choices food labeling program. This program is intended to be a “front-of-pack” labeling program (cause turning the product around to read nutritional information is just silly) that “helps shoppers make smarter food and beverage choices”. From their website:
To qualify for the Smart Choices Program, a product must meet a comprehensive set of nutrition criteria based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and other sources of nutrition science and authoritative dietary guidance. The Smart Choices Program covers food and beverages in 19 distinct product categories, including cereals, meats, fruits, vegetables, dairy, and snacks, allowing shoppers to compare similar products.
On the surface, this program ostensibly leaves ‘the work’ of determining if a certain food is healthy or not to the Smart Choices program which puts it up against, what one would assume to be, strict nutritional guidelines and criteria. If they determine a food is ‘Smart Choice worthy’, it gets the label and you the consumer have to think no further than that when it comes to the health of yourself and your family. Great! All I have to do now when I go shopping is buy things with a green checkmark on it and I’ll be healthy! Oh if it were only that easy.
What They Don’t Tell You…Is The Most Important
The Smart Choices program fails to tell you a few minor details when it comes to its criteria for inclusion in the program, nutritional guidelines and where its mandate comes from. First of all, the main prerequisite for inclusion into the program is not healthy food; it’s $100,000 per year paid by the companies who produce the foods seeking inclusion.
Second, the nutritional guidelines are loosely taken from government dietary guidelines and “widely accepted nutritional standards”. Both of which are open to any type of interpretation and debate into their true nutritional and health effectiveness. Numerous nutritional and health experts have said that the Smart Choice program nutritional criteria are seriously flawed allowing for such items as Fruit Loops, mayonnaise and other salty and sugar-laden food products to bear the Smart Choice label.
Fruit Loops Are “A Better Choice”
The program’s president, and spinster, Eileen T. Kennedy (who is somehow the dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University) says that the Smart Choice label doesn’t mean a food is ‘good for you’; it just means it’s a “better for you” product. Better than what; a bowl of sugar? Perhaps her explanation to the New York Times will help clarify what she means:
“The checkmark means the food item is a ‘better for you’ product, as opposed to having an x on it saying ‘Don’t eat this,’ ” Dr. Kennedy said. “Consumers are smart enough to deduce that if it doesn’t have the checkmark, by implication it’s not a ‘better for you’ product. They want to have a choice. They don’t want to be told ‘You must do this.’ ”
When asked about how a food like Fruit Loops could bear any sort of health insinuated labeling, she responds:
“You’re rushing around, you’re trying to think about healthy eating for your kids and you have a choice between a doughnut and a cereal,” Dr. Kennedy said, evoking a hypothetical parent in the supermarket. “So Froot Loops is a better choice.”
Froot Loops qualifies for the label because it meets standards set by the Smart Choices Program for fiber and Vitamins A and C, and because it does not exceed limits on fat, sodium and sugar. It contains the maximum amount of sugar allowed under the program for cereals, 12 grams per serving, which in the case of Froot Loops is 41 percent of the product, measured by weight. That is more sugar than in many popular brands of cookies.
As one public advocate and former member of the program’s panel said “You could start out with some sawdust, add calcium or Vitamin A and meet the criteria.”
Flawed From The Start
Lastly, the Smart Choices program is largely funded and chaired by the very industry which it seeks to label. The majority members that sit on the panel that determine the program’s guidelines and products to be included work for, or have worked for, the processed foods industry. To say that there is a conflict of interests here would be an understatement.
In addition to its counterintuitive nutritional guidelines and incestuous review panel, the Smart Choice program gets more money as more products that bear its label sell. So it behooves the program to get as many products as it can into the program. Again, laying the foundations for misrepresentation and ineffectiveness.
The Good: The Smart Choice label won’t be on everything sold in stores
The Bad: The label highlights only the marginally ‘good’ nutritional components of food and addresses nothing regarding the negative (Fruit Loops). The origin, farming methods (pesticides, herbicides, hormones, antibiotics, etc.), processing methods, and environmental/sociological impact of the food is not part of the program’s criteria or goal.
The Bottom-Line: A thinly veiled food industry-backed labeling program that is designed to dupe lazy uninquisitive consumers into thinking that what they’re buying is healthy when in fact it is not.
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