Dive Brief:
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Food products with label claims of being low in a less desirable ingredient aren't necessarily nutritious, a University of North Carolina study found.
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Researchers found 13% of food and 35% of beverages made a claim of being low in something. While products with a label claim were more likely to have less calories, sugar, fat and sodium, there was no consistent amount or level of more beneficial nutrients.
- Nutrient claims are ingredient-specific, not product-specific. A low-fat product could be compensating with higher proportional quantities of something like sodium or sugar.
Dive Insight:
Researchers looked at 80 million food and beverage purchases in the U.S. between 2008 and 2012.
“Foods containing low-sugar, low-fat or low-salt claims had a worse nutritional profile than those without claims. In fact, in some cases, products that tend to be high in calories, sodium, sugar or fat may be more likely to have low- or no-content claims, chief investigator Lindsey Smith Taillie said.
The government deserves full credit for enabling so confusing a situation to exist. The Food and Drug Administration allows food and beverage manufacturers to make different kinds of label claims in different ways for different products. This study makes it clear: Rather than clarifying nutrition information, those claims may have made matters worse.
The FDA is working on modernizing its label claims, and is starting with the term "healthy." The term was first defined 20 years ago, based on pushes at that time to reduce fat intake and increase nutrients. Today, sugary cereals can use that definition to say they are "healthy," but it doesn't apply to something like almonds.
As the agency hears comments and weighs how to best word label claims, they should be judicious and careful with how they can appear going forward. In research presented at a public hearing on redefining "healthy," FDA researchers said nine out of 10 consumers use health claims to make purchasing decisions. In studies, consumers were likely to say a wide variety of products that had health-related claims — ranging from chips to candy — were better for them than counterparts without the claims.