Bizarre Food Labeling - Why Nutrition Labeling is Important
The world around, anyone who buys packaged foods, just takes for granted the nutrition labeling information and the riches of additional detail about where the product was manufactured, how long it is safe to keep, the exact ingredients used, and much more. We take these for granted today, because they seem like all the information we could ever need. As it happens, it hasn't ever been easy for consumer groups, or the FDA to get a degree of honesty into the system: food corporations have to spend a lot of money appraising their production to make sure it keeps to the levels they have declared on food labels, and on keeping from public view the cost-cutting they love, substituting corn syrup for sugar, strange oil blends for butter and so on. And the struggle for transparency never ended. The food corporations still try to get around the rules, and make it as difficult for you as they can to actually understand and act on the nutrition labeling on the tins and bottles on your supermarket shelves.
To get around the rules as far as they can, food makers have always conjured up unnatural new vernaculars to describe the foods they sell. They technically satisfy the requirements of the law, even as they succeed in getting consumers to be so impressed that they never would suspect the needed to check what was actually on the nutrition labeling. You see these everywhere: "100% natural" usually ends up meaning merely, that they use no artificial food coloring. However, they feel free to use food flavoring. And bread or cookies made with "Natural Goodness" isn't made in an old-fashioned bakery with farm fresh wheat; it just means that they add a miniscule amount of artificial vitamin of the kind you would find in your bread if you could get it naturally made. You get the picture. But it could be entertaining to look at some of the really common reality-challenged box labeling practices out there.
When they say that your juice has the "Goodness of Real Fruit Within", you would take that to mean that it was mostly made with fruit, quite like the large succulent stuff pictured on the label now wouldn't you? Betty Crocker's strawberry juice doesn't have any strawberries at all; it has pear juice made from concentrate, and artificial strawberry flavoring. When they said it had real juice, they didn't say what kind of juice did they? Apparently this is quite common with fruit beverages; they all contain either a white grape juice concentrate or pear concentrate, no matter what flavor they finally end up tasting like.
But what if they say that your fruit punch or squash was All Natural? A famous orange fruit drink product from Atlanta does claim to be All Natural, but the only natural stuff and it is high fructose corn syrup. Now who is to go argue with them that that you can't call it natural just because it comes from natural corn? You just need to look closely at the nutrition labeling on everything, to find out exactly how much of what lies within is natural as you really understand it intuitively. A great rule for today's world would be, if it isn't something you could make yourself at home with a recipe book, don't buy it.
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