What are you eating?

A study recently published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association stated that only 61.5% of people check the nutrition labels on their food before they buy it. In the past ten years, there’s been a lot of attention paid to those nutrition labels – to make them easier to read and easier to understand. But if only about 60% of people are reading them, what does that say about the effectiveness of the labels?

Well, obviously they’re not working. But why?

There are several possible answers to this question. Maybe the nutrition labels are still too complicated. Are they in need of further reworking to make them comprehensible to the average consumer?

Or maybe people just don’t care. Maybe they simply want to eat the foods they like, without having to worry about things like fat grams, sodium content, or calorie count. Is this all an exercise in futility? Should we let people consume their food in blissful ignorance? Perhaps we should get rid of nutrition labels altogether. If nothing else, it would probably save a few cents per item in printing costs.

I don’t agree with either of those arguments. I think the evidence is out there that people do care about the nutritional content of their food – we see evidence of this in the outcry against transfats and the demand for nutritional labels in the first place. So how can we get people to read the labels more? After all, that same study found that people who read nutritional labels consume fewer calories, fat, saturated fat, and sugar than people who don’t read labels.

There’s another solution that most people don’t talk about. It takes less time than modifying nutritional labels, and it doesn’t require the cooperation of the food manufacturers, an act of Congress, or even any special education on the part of the consumer. All it requires is one thing: For people to eat less processed food. After all, you don’t need a label to tell you that a bunch of spinach is good for you, or that a bag of green beans is low in fat. I’m not saying we should completely eliminate all processed foods from our diets – I’ll be the first to admit that I like my Doritos and ice cream (though hopefully not at the same time). But the less of that food we eat, the fewer nutritional labels we have to read, and the better our diet becomes.

So instead of picking up a jar of salsa and trying to figure out what the heck modified food starch is and why it’s in there anyway,  why not grab a few tomatoes, an onion, and some cilantro and make it yourself? Or put down that “spice blend”, grab some sea salt, dried oregano, and cracked pepper and make a quick and easy fish rub? It’s unlikely that any of us will be able to completely eliminate all processed foods from our diet, but the more we make things from scratch, the fewer processed foods we’ll eat.

And you don’t need a nurtitional label to tell you that.

Do you read nutrition labels? Do you find that you eat healthier when you do, or have you decided not to worry about it? We’d love to hear about it in the comments!