One of the reasons that we have come to have such detailed food facts on the nutrition labels on our packaged food is that nutrition activists and the Food and Drug Administration have always seen that nutrition labels are a good weapon against obesity inclinations. To have everyone properly informed as to what they are eating is likely to give people pause when they lean towards overeating. This line of thinking certainly has served us well; people who have the right intentions about their health, do get a certain amount of mileage out of the nutrition labels. But if you have noticed, America as a whole isn't getting any thinner. And that brings us to the latest round of battles to do with nutrition labels and food packages. The FDA is now fighting to bring nutrition labeling on the fronts of food packages, not on the side, and certainly not on the back. Why? To guilt you when you reach for one more chocolate, or one more helping of ice cream, of course. But there is one little hurdle to sending you on a sufficiently serious guilt trip- the serving size confusion. What the FDA calls its standard serving size, is just too small to be of any use to most people. And the calorie content guilt trip doesn't carry quite the same punch when you have to multiply everything by three.
So now that the FDA is overhauling its policy on where nutrition labels are placed on food packages, on the front, the serving size mentioned on those labels, are going to get a little bump up to. They're going to be more representative of portion sizes that Americans usually end up eating. They'd see that an extra scoop of chocolate ice cream would give them 3000 more calories; it just gives people a better handle on their fear. The truth is, people have grown used to seeing nutrition labels for so long, they fade into ambient noise noise. To have them occupy a prominent new location on the front of any package, it is going to start people thinking about what they are eating, in some cases, for the first time. It could actually bring more confusion than clarity into the arena.
Let's look at a very common offender in our struggles with food: the standard bag of potato chips. One standard nutrition label is on potato chip bags; you will often find something like 150 calories listed per serving. A serving of potato chips turns out to be no more than ten chips; as if anyone could stop at ten. Any normal person would eat at least 50 chips at one sitting watching a movie. That would easily add up to 750 calories. Nutritional labels were invented to help us gain a handle on our food portions; but the way the serving sizes are measured today, the help really doesn't mean anything. The FDA is certainly going to get manufacturers to redefine serving sizes, but it isn't going to force manufacturers to put their nutrition labels out front. What it will do, is to make sure that they don't labels things in such a way that the good gets pushed out front and covers up for the bad.
Nutrition labels today, have serving size mixups that would even flummox a diet expert. A serving of ice cream is half a cup. A serving of Oreos would be one ounce. A serving of cornflakes would be something more than a half cup. How is anyone to know what they call a serving, for each kind of food? The FDA hopes that listing larger serving sizes, won't be taken by the public as a message that eating more is fine by the health experts. If that is the message people come away with after all this trouble, what hope is there?