May 27 2008

Uh oh. New Zealand tests label claims

New Zealand food packages are covered with nutrition and health claims just like ours, but the food agency only began allowing them a few years ago. The agency thought it might be interesting to find out whether the packages really contained the levels of vitamins and minerals claimed on the labels. Oops. Turns out that 58% did not. They either had too little (15%) or too much (42%). The excuses: built-in safety margins, hard-to-mix ingredients, unstable vitamins, uncertain analytic methods. The FDA hasn’t done one of these investigations in a long time, as far as I know. I wonder what it would find if it did?

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  • Sheila
  • May 29, 2008
  • 8:32 pm

They would find melamine.

  • Diana
  • May 30, 2008
  • 2:18 pm

Someone should do one of these investigations. Maybe the Environmental Working Group? I wonder about what is really in my multivitamin, especially since learning that something like 95% of vitamin C in US products come from China. I now worry about almost everything I buy that isn’t a whole food (and even then you don’t really know how it was grown, whether it is “really” organic).

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