I recently bought a pack of Orbit mint gum from the library vending machine. On the edge of the packet, it said: “40% fewer calories than sugared gum. Calorie content of this size piece has been reduced from 5 to 3 calories.”
I chuckled — then frowned. A typical person should ideally consume around 2,000 calories per day, so a two-calorie reduction in a food item is laughably insignificant. But by framing this minute reduction as “40%,” it seems substantial.
This pure deception aimed at the unknowing consumer plagues packaged foods. The best example is the ubiquitous non-GMO icon, of which The Non-GMO Project’s icon is the most common: a rectangular box with a butterfly, a plant that looks like a checkmark, and the word “verified.”
This iconography works to convince consumers that non-GMO food is some sort of moral duty to uphold, a pursuit of noble activism against the processed food tyrants. At the very least, the average consumer who sees the non-GMO icon interprets it to mean the food is healthier. Yet, according to the Food and Drug Administration, there is no inherent health difference between GMO and non-GMO foods.
Others may object to GMOs because biotechnology can benefit large corporations and harm local farms. This is true. Unfortunately, almost all of the non-GMO products in your supermarket are still sold by giant corporations. It’s these big corporations that benefit from consumer beliefs that non-GMO products are more ethical and healthier when, really, they are neither.
With the increasing interest of good-willed consumers to buy more sustainable products, deceptive packaging has found a role far beyond the non-GMO logo.
Annie’s Homegrown, a natural foods company owned by General Mills, exploits the fact that health-conscious consumers are looking for simpler, shorter ingredients labels. The company’s Cheddar Bunnies, an organic analog to Cheez-Its, might appear healthier at a grocery-aisle glance because it has a shorter ingredients list. However, the shorter list stems only from the fact that they do not enrich their main ingredient, refined wheat flour.
On the longer Cheez-Its label, the standard enrichments are listed like so: “niacin, reduced iron, vitamin B1 (thiamin mononitrate), vitamin B1 (riboflavin), folic acid.” These enrichments, while clunky on an ingredients list, are recommended by the World Health Organization and are mandatory in Canada. Annie’s decision to exclude enrichments is particularly unfortunate as they are a company that markets primarily to children, who are more susceptible to nutrient deficiencies.
Food manufacturers also engage in other misleading practices to enhance the marketability of their products.
For example, dairy products will proudly claim to be free of rBST, a synthetic hormone used to increase milk production, even though the FDA has found no difference between rBST-treated and untreated cows.
Many brands of kombucha claim to promote a “happy gut” or aid the liver in detoxification, though the limited existing research in support of this tends to be highly generalized, extending known benefits of singular compounds within kombucha to the entire beverage itself. Finally, other products claim high protein content in grams per serving, but this is only because the serving size is very large.
To remedy the food packaging ills detailed above, the FDA can make changes to food labelling requirements to limit misinformation. This includes limiting the display of deceptive icons like the non-GMO logo, requiring a disclosure that specifies that a particular product is not enriched and categorizing claims like “improves gut health” as medical claims, which require the familiar disclaimer “this statement has not been evaluated by the FDA.”
Now, as consumers, what can we do? Let’s choose to not care whether or not the gum has gone from five to three calories. I think that’s about the same number of calories you burn when you blink your eyes. Or maybe even just wink.
Nick Bucciarelli is a Weinberg junior. He can be contacted at [email protected]. If you would like to respond publicly to this op-ed, send a Letter to the Editor to [email protected]. The views expressed in this piece do not necessarily reflect the views of all staff members of The Daily Northwestern.
