TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/071591/0715130.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 16.0 KB | 337 lines

                                                                                HEALTH, Page 52

COVER STORIES

The Fight over Food Labels


By launching a holy war against misleading claims, the government
could clear up some of the confusion on supermarket shelves and
help Americans become healthier consumers

By CHRISTINE GORMAN -- Reported by Marc Hequet/Minneapolis, Janice
M. Horowitz/New York and Dick Thompson/Washington


    Like many a red-blooded American, Olivia Vavreck of
Minneapolis loves a good prime rib and a baked potato smothered
in butter. But ever since she checked into the hospital with
chest pains last year and learned that her cholesterol level was
in the upper stratosphere, the 57-year-old office manager has
tried to cut down on the fat in her diet. Easier said than done.
Although the labels on every other product in the grocery store
promised nutritional nirvana, Vavreck found herself floundering
in quagmires of grease, salt, corn syrup and other dubious
digestibles. "I thought I was doing pretty well because I was
always buying the stuff that said `low cholesterol' or `no
cholesterol,'" she recalls. "But then I found out that the fat
content in some of them is so high that they're still bad for
you."

    About half of all consumers say they depend on labels to
determine which food to buy. "I see so many women reading labels
now, they run the risk of having their pocketbooks stolen,"
says Jane Bohanan, an Atlanta homemaker. Yet a casual stroll
down the aisles of a supermarket reveals just how often Bohanan
and other shoppers are being shamelessly deceived.

    -- Budget Gourmet Light and Healthy Salisbury Steak, which
is labeled "low fat," derives 45% of its total calories from
fat.

    -- Diet Coke contains more than the one heavily advertised
calorie per can (so does Diet Pepsi).

    -- There is no real fruit -- just fruit flavors -- in Post
Fruity Pebbles.

    -- Honey Nut Cheerios provides less honey than sugar and
more salt than nuts.

    -- Mrs. Smith's Natural Juice Apple Pie contains
artificial preservatives. The word natural refers to the fruit
juice used to make the pie.

    If you can't trust Mrs. Smith, whom can you trust? "The
labels are all distorted," says Donna Krone, 41, an attorney in
New York City who tries to sandwich a healthy diet into her
high-pressure workweek. "The whole mess makes me want to just
give up and order in Chinese food."

    More and more shoppers have awakened to the scope of the
deception and reacted with disgust and contempt for product
labels. Fully 40% of consumers claim they are highly skeptical
of what they read on the packages in their grocery carts. And
medical experts see a distinct danger in the muddled messages.
"For someone with chronic heart disease, hypertension or
diabetes, the current manufacturers' labels can be downright
dangerous," says Gail Levey, a spokeswoman for the American
Dietetic Association. People with high blood pressure, for
example, should be wary of falling for Stouffer's Lean Cuisine,
which proudly boasts "Never more than a gram of sodium" in its
print advertisements. While the claim is true, the implication
-- that this is a very low-salt product -- is not. Nutritionists
normally measure sodium in milligrams (thousandths of a gram),
not grams. Several diet delights from Stouffer's contain almost
half the amount of sodium allowed daily on a typical
salt-restricted diet.

    Throughout the past decade, federal food watchdogs napped
to the sounds of this cacophony of false claims. The Food and
Drug Administration virtually invited abuse by lifting its own
long-standing ban against health promotions on food labels. But
the deregulatory winds have shifted, and the sleeping sentry has
awakened. In a blaze of whistle blowing, the FDA, headed by
tough new commissioner David Kessler, is cracking down. The
agency has begun seizing products with misleading labels,
developing new guidelines for nutritional information and
exposing hollow health claims.

    Kessler's utterly novel vision: that consumers should
easily be able to tell what they are ingesting by reading what
is written on food labels. "I'm not one to tell people what to
eat," he says. "But for those who want to use information, for
those who really care or are at risk of heart disease, we have
an obligation to make sure the information is conveyed in a
useful way."

    Already Kessler has fired several salvos at deceivers.
First hit was Procter & Gamble. The conglomerate had received
numerous letters from the FDA complaining about the labeling of
its Citrus Hill Fresh Choice orange juice, which is made from
concentrate. In April, Kessler instructed his inspectors to
publicly seize 2,000 cases of the juice. Two days and many
headlines later, the company, based in Cincinnati, agreed to
remove the term fresh from its label. Soon after, executives at
Ragu Foods of Trumbull, Conn., consented to drop the offending
word from their Ragu Fresh Italian pasta sauces, which, like
many other prepared sauces, are heat processed. In May the FDA
ordered that the "no-cholesterol" claim be removed from Best
Foods' Mazola Corn Oil and HeartBeat Canola Oil, made by Great
Foods of America. Like all plant oils, these products never
contained cholesterol.

    Just last week Kessler's FDA took aim at juice producers
by proposing new regulations that would force them to disclose
for the first time exactly how much and what kinds of juice are
in their fruit-juice drinks. Such a rule would reveal, for
instance, that Veryfine drinks contain only 10% fruit juice. It
would also inform consumers that even the claims made by many
cranberry and raspberry drinks to be "100% juice" are somewhat
misleading: they are filled with deflavored apple or grape
extracts that are little more than natural sugar water.

    Congress supplied Kessler with the ammunition for his
consumers' crusade last fall, when it passed the Nutritional
Labeling and Education Act. The law, which sailed through both
houses unopposed, requires new, straightforward labels for all
foods, including fresh fruits and vegetables. While the changes
will not become mandatory until May 1993, the FDA has until
November of this year to come up with proposals for what the new
labels should say. In addition, public pressure is mounting --
from such groups as the American Association of Retired Persons,
the American Heart Association and the National Parent-Teacher
Association -- to revamp the labels on meat and poultry, which
are regulated separately by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

    While the nutrition act does not apply to restaurants,
where a growing number of Americans are eating many of their
meals, some proprietors have jumped on the bandwagon with knife
and fork in hand. Jeff Prince, senior director of the National
Restaurant Association, says that labeling the menus at
table-service restaurants probably will not work in most cases,
but 80% of fast-food franchises have begun to provide nutrition
information. "The recession has driven a lot of this," Prince
explains. "When a significant portion of the population wants
ingredient information, that number can make the difference
between success and failure."

    Kessler is waging a crusade well suited to the 1990s: it
involves no new money. In fact, during the past decade the FDA
has been given a host of new and taxing responsibilities,
including the oversight of the generic-drug industry, the
evaluation of hundreds of AIDS treatments and now the
redesigning of food labels. Yet the agency's budget has not
increased proportionally. "We've had to divert people from
laboratory work, and we've brought people in from the field,"
says Ed Scarbrough, the chief architect of the FDA's new
labeling program. He believes that the task of coming up with
revised guidelines would require 120 people. He has just 30.

    The relabeling effort may cost food manufacturers $600
million during the next two decades. They will pass on the tab
to consumers, but fortunately it is very low: only about 11
cents for every $100 worth of groceries, according to government
estimates. Even the most conservative projections place the
potential benefit from reduced medical costs and increased
productivity at $3.6 billion. If everyone who reads labels were
to adopt a healthier diet, the savings could jump to more than
$100 billion.

    Americans have a long history of prodding government to
act when public health and dietary issues are at stake. Popular
outrage over the Chicago meat-packing scandals, revealed in
Upton Sinclair's 1906 classic, The Jungle, gave rise to both a
meat-inspection law and the predecessor to the modern FDA. The
discovery, during World War II, that many draftees suffered from
beriberi and other vitamin B deficiencies led to the
government's creation of the Recommended Dietary Allowances for
vitamins and minerals.

    But times have changed. "Now nearly everyone agrees that
there are virtually no deficiencies in the American diet,"
Scarbrough says. "The problems today are from overnutrition."
Particularly overdosing on fat, cholesterol and overall
calories. As a result, health professionals are more concerned
about chronic maladies related to overnutrition, such as heart
disease, cancer, some forms of diabetes and obesity. They no
longer simply count calories but look at the composition of the
entire diet.

    The main culprit, everyone concurs, is fat -- not just the
fat that bulges the waistline but the fat that lurks in most
high-protein and lusciously rich foods. Health-conscious eaters
who sought out high-quality protein and dieted by discarding the
buns from their hamburgers, it turned out, were doing just about
everything wrong. Americans typically get about 40% of their
daily calories from fat, instead of the 30% recommended. The
body is particularly efficient at turning excess saturated fat
-- the type found in meats and whole-milk dairy products -- into
the arteries' archenemy, cholesterol. This villainous substance
should therefore account for no more than 10% of the daily
caloric intake. For a healthy man who consumes 2,500 calories
a day, that translates into about 28 g, or the equivalent of
half a stick of butter.

    Spaghetti lovers, take note. Carbohydrates, particularly
the complex ones found in pasta, cereals and legumes, should
make up at least 55% of the diet. Although the evidence is not
as solid as the tie between excess fat and heart disease,
scientists now believe that loading up on fiber-rich complex
carbs (like whole-wheat bread or bran cereal) while cutting back
on fat may reduce the risk of breast, colon and other cancers.
In addition, health-conscious citizens should keep their dietary
cholesterol intake to less than 300 mg, the equivalent of a
little more than one egg yolk a day, and their salt intake to
less than 2,400 mg, or 1 1/4 tsp.

    Regulators have targeted three major areas of label abuse:
deceptive definitions, hazy health claims and slippery serving
sizes. Phase I of their program, already under way, covers fresh
fruit, vegetables, seafood and other edibles that have never
before been subject to nutritional labeling requirements.
Grocers will not be asked to plaster ingredients labels on an
apple or haddock; instead, they will post nutritional
information at their produce bins and fish counters. In
addition, the FDA is under congressional orders to standardize
the requirements for such terms as juice and juice drink.

    Scheduled for completion this fall, Phase II will focus on
making labels mean exactly what they say. Among the worst
culprits are products that claim to be 80%, 90% or even 99% fat
free. Although technically correct, the labels are misleading
because virtually all manufacturers base their calculations not
on the composition of calories, but on weight, including water,
which occurs naturally in most food. For example, Louis Rich
Turkey Bologna accurately claims to be "82% fat free, 18% fat."
It sounds perfect for people who are trying to keep their fat
consumption below 30% a day. Yet each 60-calorie slice, which
weighs 28 g (or 1 oz.), contains 5 g of fat. Since each gram of
fat accounts for nine calories, 75% -- not 18% -- of the
calories in a slice of Louis Rich Turkey Bologna come from fat.

    It is hard enough to find time to go shopping without
having to worry about taking along a personal computer, so the
FDA is considering requiring labels that include the total
number of calories as well as how many calories are derived from
fat. Yet the proposed requirement could end up trading one kind
of confusion for another. "We're a little concerned that the
consumer won't know how to interpret this number," says Guy
Johnson, nutrition director for Grand Metropolitan's food
sector. "Let's say you have a product that has 30 calories from
fat, which would mean roughly 3 g of fat. That would basically
be a pretty low-fat product. How ever, if people see the 30 and
think of it as percent of calories from fat, they may needlessly
avoid the food."

    Under Kessler's direction, the FDA is modifying the order
in which ingredients are listed on a label. Traditionally,
components have been listed in descending order by weight. That
enables manufacturers to play games with sweeteners, listing
each type (corn syrup, sugar, honey, and so on) separately so
they will appear in the lower part of the list. Kessler wants
the sweeteners to be grouped together to enable a shopper to
tell at a glance just how sweet those granola bars really are.

    Phase III of the FDA plan, which begins next year, will
provide standard definitions for such descriptive terms as
high-fiber, low fat and light and certify health claims listed
on product packages. This phase will also address the tricks
associated with serving size. Until the federal agency jumped
into the fray, private physicians and nutritionists had been
fighting a lonely rearguard action in this realm of superslim
slivers and oversize wedges. A manufacturer wishing to boost the
nutrient value of a cereal, for example, simply bases the label
on an oversize portion. If low calories are the object, the
portion becomes minuscule. Take, for example, Entenmann's
fat-free Chocolate Loaf Cake, which boasts a scant 70 calories
per 1-oz. serving. No one with a sweet tooth would ever cut the
cake this small, argues Dr. Brian Levy, who treats diabetics at
New York University Medical Center. "It is physically almost
impossible and emotionally unsatisfying to eat just 1 oz.," he
says. Haagen-Dazs markets a frozen yogurt that is lower in
calories than its ice cream. But to make the yogurt seem even
less fattening, the label lists a smaller serving size: 3 oz.
for a helping of yogurt, 4 oz. for ice cream.

    Although business executives grumble about the costs of
relabeling, many manufacturers are philosophical about the
reform movement. "I don't think the whole industry would be
going through these changes without pressure from consumers,"
says Bob Pusey, a spokesman for Calistoga Mineral Water. "This
is not a fad. The thing we're all going to have to get used to
is that the consumer has a right to know and wants to know what
is in food." The producers' major concern: that the FDA's new
rules be consistent and easy to implement. "Already we're
hearing about a number of exemptions," says DeeAnn Campbell, a
vice president with Del Monte Foods in San Francisco. "We just
want to know clearly what does and does not have to be done."

    As always, the real test will be whether consumers find
the new labels truly helpful. The packagers will also have to
win back the public's abused trust. If Americans can depend on
the information on the new labels, then they will be able to
take the first, least expensive step toward better health
through a better diet. They will also be able to discover at
last the true answer to that age-old question, What are we
eating for dinner?