Accuracy in Food Labeling

Here's a scary article for people that are actually trying to do the right thing in their diet.

I suppose it shouldn't be much of a surprise, though. Many government agencies are charged with a large set of duties and then find themselves understaffed and underfunded and apparently it includes the FDA. This leaves the patients in charge of the asylum, or in this case the food packagers and manufacturers are allowed to police themselves.

Essentially the article is talking about how food labels are often found to be inaccurate. Not just a few. This is saying that approximately 25% of labels are wrong. One in four!

From the article:
In testing in the past couple of years, Florida found:

• Sugar in sugar free coconut pies sold at Walmart.
• Sugar in sugar free syrup made by Walden Farms.
• More sodium than claimed in Orville Redenbacher Popcorn Cakes.
• Sugar in sugar free Hill & Valley Apple Walnut Muffins.
• Fat exceeding the labels claim in Publix whole wheat hamburger buns.
• More sugar than the labels claim in Sunsweet prune juice.

For people with diabetes or people who are post-surgery bariatric patients, the fact that sugar-free items are found to contain sugar is not exactly welcomed news. This may explain some of those "occasional" blood sugar test anomalies, though.

This is extremely disconcerting. There's the buzz I've grown accustomed to..."frankenfoods" (genetically modified foods) cause issues, frankenfoods are safer and cheaper, these oils and these additives are safe, wait, these oils will accumulate and kill you and these additives will give you arse cancer, high fructose corn syrup is safe, high fructose corn syrup will cause your genitals to fall off...blah blah.

Dieting is a matter of calories in, calories out. But wait! Eat these pills and you'll lose weight! Eat celery and you'll have NEGATIVE calories! Drink this, puree that, swallow some olive oil and the weight magically slips away! Try the Olestra and you'll see it's true!

Then there's disappointing news. I got that from reading labels. Those burgers have how many calories? And KFC has how much sodium? Holy schnikes...

Later I found articles about how much corn was really in our foods. Wonder how much corn was in a Chicken McNugget? A lot more than I thought there was. And of course how many manufacturers are benefiting from artificially inflated prices on sugar so they can profit from corn-derived additives like high fructose corn syrup.

Then there was the disconcerting. The calories on the label aren't accurate because calorimeters read the calories in the food, but the texture affects how we digest it, so we don't get all of it? That's where I discovered that if you eat 200 calories of peanuts versus 200 calories of peanut butter, you actually get closer to 200 calories from the peanut butter while some of the calories in the nuts aren't digested because...well, they don't digest as readily. For someone as tied to numbers and accuracy as I am, this was troublesome.

Now I find out that labels may be outrightly lying about what they contain.

This. Sucks.

It's hard enough for us to know what's in our food and how we should be eating. It's beginning to look more and more like the people that always came off as food extremist nuts, people who advocate eating nothing but what you dig out of your backyard garden or raise from an egg in a coop lest the evil corporations poison you without your knowledge.

Sadly it's getting easier and easier to believe them.