The Best Food Labels Are Finally Here
Almost four years after we first told you this , food labels are finally changing. Calories are more visible, “added sugar” is on and “calories from fat” are not, and serving size is, in many cases, the entire package. Welcome to the future.
The changes were supposed to take effect several years ago, but the dates have been postponed. Now it works for large companies, and small companies need to merge by January next year.
Nobody cares about calories from fat anymore.
The old labels were developed in the 1990s when the standard advice was to limit calories, including fat, to about a third of your total calories. But the total fat in your diet doesn’t really matter much, so this rule of thumb isn’t very helpful.
The grams of fat are still on the label, so if you really want to do this calculation, simply multiply the grams of fat by 9.
Added sugar is now required
Old labels said how much sugar was in the food, but they didn’t differentiate between sugars that occur naturally (like an apple) and those that are added (like sugar or corn syrup, used to sweeten applesauce.) …
Added sugar is nutritionally similar to natural sugar – chemically the same substance – but foods with added sugar tend to have more empty calories, and empty calories give us more insight into how our foods are processed.
Serving size makes more sense
Serving sizes of some foods have changed. For example, a serving of ice cream used to be a rather unreal half cup. Now it’s down to 2/3 a cup, which is … still a little optimistic, but better.
The best part, however, is that many packages now have to display the amount of calories and nutrients in each package . Thus, you can see labels with two columns, where the calories per serving along with the calories of the entire product.
Some companies are still catching up
Some companies rebuilt their labels months or years ago; others have just started working since January. But smaller companies that sell food for less than $ 10 million a year must renew their labels by January 2021. We’re in a tough transition now, but soon new labels will be the norm.