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 These ‘low-content’ claims are based on comparisons with other foods
and are not standard definitions. Making such a claim doesn’t
necessarily mean the food is more nutritious than other brands, the
authors say.
Consumers should “turn the package around and look at the entire
nutritional profile as well as the ingredients list in order to get
a better sense of whether the product overall is healthier or less
healthy,” Lindsey Smith Taillie of the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill told Reuters Health in a phone call.
Smith Taillie and colleagues analyzed data on more than 80 million
food and beverage purchases made in the United States by 40,000
families from 2008 to 2012.
“We found that higher-income households tended to be more likely to
buy products with these types of claims, which is consistent with
previous research that suggests that claims tend to be more utilized
by people with higher levels of education,” Smith Taillie said.
As reported in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and
Dietetics, 13 percent of food and 35 percent of beverage purchases
included products with some type of low-content claim. Low-fat
purchases were the most common, followed by low-calorie, low-sugar,
and low-sodium claims.
On average, packaged foods with low-nutrient claims had 32 percent
fewer calories, 11 percent less sugar, and about half the fat and
sodium compared to foods that didn’t carry any claims on the
packaging.
However, some products with low-nutrient claims actually had more of
that substance than foods without those claims.
Also, Smith Taillie said, when a product has a low-sugar claim, for
example, it might have less sugar than a reference product or a
similar product, “but it doesn't mean that it has an overall better
nutritional quality.”
Or, "it could be a high-sugar food but be low in fat, so it's going
to say low fat on the label. That doesn't mean that it's healthy,"
she said.
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“Essentially, it can be kind of misleading to make a decision about
a product based on a front-of-package claim," she added.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates what products can
claim, Smith Taillie said.
"It's not that the products are technically wrong in making a
low-content claim, it's just that the rules that allow them to make
this kind of claim vary by the claim and by food category," she
said.
Food labels can be confusing, agreed Melissa Rifkin, a dietitian
with Montefiore Medical Center in New York City who was not involved
in the study.
Understanding what a nutrition fact label means is more important
than focusing on marketing claims,” Rifkin told Reuters Health by
email.
Key items to focus on are serving size, quantity per container,
calories, fat, sodium and sugar, she said.
A new and revamped nutrition fact label is under development, Rifkin
said.
“Slowly we will begin to see all labeling take on the new
information,” she said.
SOURCE: http://bit.ly/2n1TTeX Journal of the Academy of Nutrition
and Dietetics, online March 15, 2017.
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