Food Politics

Too bad the 1st place design attempts to designate food as thumbs up or down based on nutrient attributes. Shame on the judges for promoting this thinking. Each food doesn’t need to adhere to specific guidelines. Balance is about including the nutrient mix of all foods to meet needs….and still way too emphasis on fat. It would be enough to let people know what is in the food. Not everyone thrives with a 2000 calorie diet, and not everyone benefits from a relatively high carbohydrate, low fat approach.

I scanned through the labels quickly. I personally like the ones showing bar chart-like indicators for the proportion of nutrients. I think that really helps in speeding up label-comparisons between different food brands/items.

The 2nd place label shows all calories, vs per serving. That has its arguments, but makes it harder for people to compare food items like cereal. I think a better move would be to standardize serving sizes shown (e.g., no 1 cup vs ¾ cup comparisons). I really dislike the ones with the smart phone tags or shaped like iPhones. Please, people, we’re not all iPhone totin’ Bay Area white liberals (like the judges).

(This is coming from a Bay Area liberal, btw)

I don’t actually like ANY of the labels chosen as top choice. By looking at each of the labels, I found that all of them wasted a lot of space to give the kind of information it wanted to, and it wasn’t always clear what information was trying to be presented.

What comes to my mind is that we should be consulting Edward Tufte, emeritus professor of statistics (and I believe information sciences) at Yale University. Now, he really knows how to design well visually. Edward Tufte is always keen on presenting a good number of information in a small amount of space. He came up with the idea of “spark lines”.

I hope none of these designs are chosen, or rather if they are chosen, that even the grand prize winner is heavily critiqued. We should seek the services of Edward Tufte!

I also agree with Modugno that the labels are overwhelmingly judgemental and that shouldn’t occur. It shouldn’t be giving simple messages of thumbs up or thumbs down. Instead, it should present information that is clear without telling the consumer whether they need more or less of that kind of ingredient. Each person is different and some people can take higher amounts of fats than others, and some should take much more than what is nutritionally recommended for any nutrient.

Again, I totally dislike the labels and hope that the judges eventually give a strong critique and problematise the winning labels.

Maybe I’m too much of a science person but all of these entries seemed heavy on graphics and somewhat subjective judgement, and light on information that can be used when thinking about a food item. And many of them were completely incomprehensible at a quick glance!

The nutrition label can definitely use some updating, but the designs chosen are not really any more helpful than what is currently in place. Listing ingredients in grams when the USA does not measure this way, makes no sense. I’m sure this harkens back to our quest to change to the metric system, but we haven’t and looks like we never will. The average person has no idea that twenty grams of sugar is 4 tsps. Maybe if listed as such that would help someone rethink eating a small sweetened yogurt cup which on average contains 4 tsps of sugar. Having the total number of calories PLUS the amount in a serving and what a serving size should be would be helpful. Total calories per package might help someone rethink eating a whole bag of potato chips. Labeling fat by actual number of fat calories per serving, again instead of by grams or % would help. Judging the ingredients with thumbs up/down or red/yellow/green lights is not going to go far in the food industry and will be lobbied right out. Redesigning the food label is not an easy task. An uneducated public is going to be confused no matter what the label looks like if they don’t inform themselves about additives, fats, calories, sugar, etc. The look of many of those in the contest is appealing, but the info is still as confusing as the current labels. Good luck to whomever actually redesigns the labels. It will be a mammoth task!

I wonder if it’s so much that “people are confused” with the current nutrition labeling on food or more that it just doesn’t actually matter to most people when they decide what food products to buy. In both instances, consumers make decisions that food authorities don’t approve of. My guess is that the reason why is due to more of the latter than the former, but nonetheless as a consumer, I’m always a fan of more information rather than less.

That being said, I think most of the proposed labels that I saw actually had less information items displayed than the current label. Most of the labels are color-coded with bigger fonts and other fancy-schmancy visuals, which means that not only would it be slightly more expensive (color ink vs. black-and-white) but it also comes at the cost of displaying less information than the current label (assuming same space constraints). Not sure if better visuals for less information is a good trade-off or not. I guess my original question would’ve been “What’s so confusing or deficient with the current label again?”

I think I like the current one better. It has less clutter, so I can find my “red flags” and nutrients of interest. Very little of what I buy is in a box or bag with this kind of label anyway, but if I do buy crackers or baked goods for a treat, I hate %DV for sodium. It is always based on a max of 2400 mg/day, when 70% of the American population needs a max of 1500 mg/day. Instead of %DV, because individual needs differ, stating actual amounts of salt, added sugar, fats, etc., and educating people about their individual health needs so that they can make the right choices, would be helpful. Stop-light graphics would be good only in a nutritionally illiterate population, which we obviously have in many places. I can tell you from teaching middle school that many people probably could not read the graphs, and would consider the %DV as something to strive to exceed (which isn’t necessarily good on the fats, salt, and sugars). It is very hard not to mislead people who choose not to know math.

What good is any lable if the company can manipulate the “information?”

Example: Formerly Hershey’s Cocoa (natural unsweetened) was labeled as 20 calories per serving and 1 g of fiber per serving.
Now it is labeled 10 calories per serving and 2 g of fiber.
Their explanation is that they are using a “more accurate” method of calculating the information. Really? Is it a coincidence that the “more accurate” method makes the product look better?

Watch out, people. Spin happens on the “Nutrition Facts” as well.

Agree with most others, current label is more informative.

The colors and graphics are confusing and take up too much space. I’d rather have the details currently provided, even if they are questionable.

Good nutrition coupled with exercise is the key to a healthy diet plan. Good nutrition is the key ingredient to improving your chances for weight loss. But we’re not talking crash diets here, or plain old starving yourself. We are talking about eating healthy and making sure your portions match the number of calories you need on a daily basis. It is believed that if you can create a 500-calorie deficiency every day between exercise and nutrition, you can lose up to a pound a week.

Pharmaspider.com

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE push for a digital requirement. Just as I haven’t read a paper newspaper in years, printed a photograph in years, done my banking on paper in years, so too do I want my nutritional facts available online. Most of the places where the facts are online they were manually typed in by either users or employees of the diet calorie counting web sites (think sparkpeople.com, livestrong.com etc.)

It only does me minimal good to have the nutritional info for any one particular food if I can’t access it digitally, add it to my daily tally, compare it to other foods, rework the portion size instantly, etc.

Jenna

I agree with Marion and also with poster “jane” and everyone who said that the designs were all worse than the existing label.

This level of creativity does not bode well for confidence in the educational system. Almost all the entries were simply a mess–overuse of graphics in a haphazard manner and a mishmash of approaches to what info is being offered–little to none of it based on actual human nutritional requirements.

I applaud the idea of including miles transported and carbon footprint, but these are not nutrition issues and would be better covered by the addition of a separate symbol or seal of approval.

I didn’t bother to vote because I thought they were all terrible. The use of grams, as jane says, is awful because we don’t use the metric system. This contest shows the futility of opening up an area where expertise is truly necessary to the whims of the public. I am all for a panel of dietitians and public health professionals (with no industry connections) to design a new label. A SMALL panel at that because we don’t want something that represents a tiny fraction of each persons idea.

Anthro, part of me thinks that the designers of those various chosen labels were more interested in the artistic and graphics element rather than information. Visual design is a combination of art and information. Unfortunately, they seemed to have focus on the art side of it and not the information.

How do we alert the designers that they’re already being critiqued right here in a different blog? They should read these comments if they haven’t already done so.