How Smart Is the "Smart Choices" Label?

Many of the biggest food producers and grocers, along with nutritionists, have teamed up to devise a new food label that will identify some products as "Smart Choices" and will give calorie counts and serving sizes in big, bold type.

That's good. But we won't know until at least Monday just how "smart" those choices will actually be.

The Chicago Tribune reports that to qualify for the label, "products cannot exceed certain levels of fat, cholesterol, sugar and sodium."

Much will depend on what those "certain levels" turn out to be.

According to the Associated Press, the developers of Smart Choices program came up with 18 categories, such as desserts, snacks, cereals, beverages, and entrees, and created nutritional guidelines within each category.

"To meet the guidelines, products can't exceed standards for items like total fat, saturated fat, added sugars or sodium," the AP reported. "They also have to have 'nutrients to encourage'—such as calcium, fiber and potassium—or 'food groups to encourage' - like fruits and vegetables, whole grains, low-fat or fat-free dairy."

A whole slew of big companies, including Kraft, General Mills, Unilever, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and Wal-Mart, have signed on to the program, which will be unveiled Monday at the American Dietetic Association's Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo.

The AP got some companies to reveal some of the products that will get the label. They include Kraft's Miracle Whip salad dressing, which contains only 35 calories per tablespoon, but which contains a relatively high level of sodium, along with soybean oil and high fructose corn syrup. It's far from a horrible product (nutritionally, anyway), but olive oil and vinegar would be a much smarter choice.

The reasoning behind creating 18 different food categories, each with its own criteria for what is a "smart choice," isn't yet clear, but it suggests that food producers perhaps don't want to compare some of their less-healthy brands with others that might be better for you. So possibly a dessert that meets the criteria for the label will be held to lesser standard than a product in the "entrees" category.

But we may know more by Monday. Watch this space.