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Do you know where your food comes from? How many different countries has it been to? How many people handled it? And in what kinds of sanitary conditions?

Well, you should. Or at least have a means to know, if you care. Read more…

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We’ve posted several times about salt recently, including  Nine Tips for Reducing Your Salt Intake. In today’s San Francisco Chronicle, Marion Nestle outlines three strategies food manufacturers adopt to address the issue of excess salt in their products:

Strategy No. 1 is to try to reduce sodium. Manufacturers say they can’t do this easily. Unless products are salty enough – reaching what the industry calls the “bliss point” – people will not buy them.

Strategy No. 2 is to spin the science. The salt industry lobbies hard to convince you that salt raises disease risk in only a small percentage of the population; that even modest reductions in salt intake could be dangerous to health; and that scientists disagree so strongly about the evidence that restrictive advice is unwarranted.

Strategy No. 3 is to pre-empt “eat less” messages by establishing generous criteria for “better-for-you” food choices. Witness the new industry-sponsored Smart Choices.

Read the entire article…

What you need to know:

The recommended daily intake is 2300mg of sodium (salt is 40% sodium). This is equivalent to a teaspoon. Most Americans consume far more than that, even twice as much. For example, there are more than 4,500 milligrams of sodium in a Dunkin’ Donuts salt bagel. Just two slices of Pizza Hut’s Thin ‘n Crispy Supreme Pizza have 1,460 milligrams.

75% of our salt comes from eating out and from packaged foods, and only a small amount from home cooked meals.

What to do at the supermarket:

Sodium content appears on food nutrition labels, so be sure to check for low values (less than 300mg per serving). Watch out for salt in surprising places such as cookies and breakfast cereals (10% of daily value!). The snack and frozen TV dinner aisles are notoriously salty, although there are new low-sodium products emerging. Look for them. Kosher meat and poultry is usually salted; best to thoroughly rinse at home before cooking. If buying veggies, opt for frozen over canned and save yourself the extra salt. Eating more meals prepared at home is a surefire way to control salt intake.

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Just in time for the American Dietetic Associations annual Expo, a coalition of scientists and food manufacturers are announcing the Smart Choices Program aimed to help consumers make better food choices at the supermarket. From the San Francisco Chronicle:

The nation’s dietitians, food makers and retailers want you to know how many calories are in that frozen pizza you devoured last night — and they don’t want you to have to go looking for it.

Amid widespread concern about obesity rates, eating habits and exercise patterns, they say they’ll help people make better eating choices by designating thousands of products as part of the new Smart Choices Program and adding nutritional information to the front of packages.

The labels, featuring calories per serving and number of servings, will likely be on products from food and beverage companies like Kraft Foods Inc., General Mills Inc., Coca-Cola Co. and PepsiCo Inc. starting next year, organizers say.

The goal of the program, to be unveiled Monday at the American Dietetic Association’s Food and Nutrition Conference and Expo, is to get people to make smarter food choices and thus improve public health.

Read article…

What you need to know:

A quick trip to the supermarket does not allow people much time to examine food labels in depth. And even if you do have a few minutes to kill, today’s nutrition labels are way too complicated for most shoppers.

Simplifying nutrition information for consumers is to be commended. Having the calorie and serving information prominently appear on the food package is great. But that green check mark is a bit worrying. Here’s why.

In a perfect world, 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 consumer’s welfare to consider, whereas food manufacturers have shareholders to please and profits to grow.

Granted, 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.

It will be interesting to see how the American consumer reacts to Smart Choices and other labeling initiatives (see NuVal and Guiding Stars) in the coming years. And more importantly, to gauge their effects on improving our dietary choices.

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