It’s time our nutrient labeling system is overhauled
Most consumers have placed great faith in their government health agencies and consumer activists’ abilities to keep them up to date with rational and meaningful nutrition data. Incredible amounts of money have been spent on labeling systems claiming to do just that.
Unfortunately, the reality is that the very institutions and people that consumers have depended on to provide them with this information have let them down miserably. An excellent example is the recent work coming out of the USDA that has demonstrated that our calorie counts on food labels are all wrong and have been so from the very beginning. See http://prn.to/OyfQOy
This is not a new revelation. Professionals in the food industry have known for decades that our understanding of calories is bogus. Calories are determined by a technique called oxygen bomb calorimetry – a fancy term to describe the complete oxidation of a food substance. The amount of heat produced is measured as calories. BUT THAT IS NOT THE WAY WE EAT FOOD. There is such a thing as digestibility! The structure of a food will affect its digestibility, and any undigested food will NOT be oxidized. But digestibility is never considered in the calorie listing on the label. I have complained about this for years at public meetings, only to be totally ignored by our public health bureaucrats. See http://bit.ly/PiHQ3t and http://bit.ly/M8tAKf . In the animal feed industry, this has been understood for decades, but not for human foods.
Why hasn’t the government accounted for this information known for decades? One reason – sloth! Accounting for digestibility means a lot more work, which they are not interested in doing. They have justified this by saying it is an unnecessary complication that consumers will not understand. As long as there was no public pressure to get it right, they didn’t want to rock the boat.
Why haven’t our consumer advocates told us about this? I can think of two reasons. Either they know so little about food that they were unaware that digestibility was never calculated in the calorie declarations or because of their ‘Merchant of Menace’ agenda, they preferred to have consumers believe that the calorie content of foods were higher than they actually were.
In fact, food digestibility has even greater implications. Foods that are less digestible have a lower bioavailability of all their nutrients, not just calories, so the entire label is wrong. Worse, in the dynamic digestions system we all have, eating low digestibility foods will hasten the passage of whatever else we are eating along with them through our system and will lower the bioavailability and calories of those foods as well. This is not rocket science! It is clear to anyone that takes the trouble to see what is going on.
Come to think of it, it’s not only time that our nutrient labeling system is overhauled; it’s time to replace those we depended on for years.
