Our Food Labels Need to Tell Us the Bad News

It's time for food manufacturers to come clean about what's in their products, a new report on food labeling suggests. In addition to trumpeting the good (high fiber!) food labels should fess up to the bad ('high sodium!') on the front of the package, argue experts from the Institute of Medicine. The report, which hopes to inform new FDA regulations on labeling, focuses on the nutrients most responsible for obesity, namely: calories, saturated fat, trans fat, and sodium, notes the New York Times.

But the industry may not like the idea of telling customers why not to eat their food. Nutrition information on food packaging is all about food industry marketing, says one nutrition expert. “If it weren’t about marketing, all this stuff would go off the packages and we would go back to packages that just said what the products were.”
(More nutrition stories.)