Chew On This

The creators of the "Smart Choices" product label, which gives calorie counts and is affixed to food items that meet certain nutritional standards, on Monday revealed the details of their criteria for which products will earn the label.

The formula is fairly complicated, which is actually a good thing, at least theoretically, because whether a particular food is "good for you" or "bad for you" isn't often reducible to an easy test, especially when it comes to processed, packaged foods.

Without running a lot of products through the formula, it's hard to know precisely how useful the labels will prove to be in practice. It is highly useful in at least one respect, though: The labels will give, in big type, the calorie count and serving size of each product. Consumers concerned about their weight—and that should be most of us—will have an easy way to determine whether it's a good idea to toss that breakfast cereal into the cart.

The part that restricts the saturated fat, sugar, sodium, and other nasties that foods can contain to earn the label seems fairly restrictive in some respects, and not very in others.

Products with any trans fats are barred entirely from getting the label. And products that contain any more than 10 percent per serving of the daily allowance of calories (as determined by the Food and Drug Administration Guidelines) from saturated fats are similarly banned. Total fats per serving must fall below 35 percent of daily calories from all fats.

But the formula seems pretty loose when it comes to sugar. Products must contain less than 25 percent per serving of total daily calories worth of "added sugar." But since, for example, fruit juices are often loaded with natural sugars, they don't count toward either the label criteria or total daily calories. So it's possible to consume large amounts of sugar every day while keeping within the Smart Choices criteria.

Depending on the food in question, the presence of bad stuff can be offset to some degree by the good stuff. If a food contains "nutrients to limit," it still may get the label as long as it contains one or more "nutrients to encourage." Each of 18 categories of foods has its own formula.

Big food companies like Kraft, Unilever, Con Agra, and Coca-Cola, and grocers like Wal-Mart, teamed up with scientists to devise the formula and the label, which will start being used in a few months.

"In a perfect world," notes the Fooducate blog, "the benchmark criteria used to state what's better for us should be defined by the FDA and USDA, and not by Coca Cola and Kraft. This is because the federal regulator has only consumers' welfare to consider, whereas food manufacturers have shareholders to please and profits to grow."

It should be noted that, for some reason, the Fooducate blog hides who is behind it.

In any case, our Mystery Blogger notes that "the Smart Choices coalition is very wide and includes many respectable academic figures, an improvement on single company initiatives such as PepsiCo's Smartspot. Still, some people may find it difficult to accept nutrition recommendations from corporations whose ultimate interest is to sell more products."

True. But Smart Choices, at least so far, seems to be the best effort yet, and anyway, it's naive to think that government agencies haven't been heavily manipulated by food producers since the beginning of nutrition labeling.