FDA Labels
Do you know how many calories you're supposed to consume in a day or, more importantly, how many calories you actually eat in an average day? Most people don't. We just try to eat the best food we can, keep portions small, and hope that our caloric expenditure outweighs our intake.
FDA labels on food packaging are of little use to the average person. If you happen to be the type of person who likes creating spreadsheets, tracking and aggregating data about how many calories you eat and burn in a day might be fun, but for the rest of us, keeping track of all those numbers is too much of a headache to handle.
I'm glad that FDA labels are required by law, because I always favor transparency...but now that we have that data available to us, what are we supposed to do with it all. Does it really make us, as eaters of that food, healthier or better off in some way?
I read an article once about a redesign of packaging for over-the-counter medication, like ibuprofen or acetaminophen, with color coded, simple labels that read "I Have a Headache" or "I Have a Cold" or "I Have Sinus Allergies". The idea was simple: instead of expecting people to remember brand names, have people be able to pick out a medicine based on their affliction. Someone who wants a pain reliever might reach for Tylenol, but that requires that the consumer's brain has the Tylenol brand mapped to pain relief.
Branding experts will tell you that this generic approach to medicine won't work. Brand names are a more effective and trusted shortcut for most people to remember, instead of labeling medicine with the symptoms they treat. Even if that isn't true, it's probably just as well we don't try and foster a society in which people are grabbing the box that says "Headache medicine" without taking the time to figure out what's in it. (Okay, so that's Excedrin slogan...maybe that is the society in which we live.)
But what about for nutritional information? Numbers are a little bit too much for people to handle, but what about color coding the contents of food on the label? Better yet, have colors represent "Good" or "Bad" in terms of percentage of daily allowance. If something is extremely high in sodium, and we know that sodium in high quantities is shown to be correlated with an increase in blood pressure, which is a bad thing, then highlight the information in red. If something has a lot of fiber in it, and fiber intake is, generally, a good thing, then have that labeled in green. Create different color "zones" for each nutritional ingredient listed. You could also create "flags" that appear on items with notoriously bad ingredients, like high-fructose corn syrup.
People don't think in numbers very well, but we are visual creatures. I would think there was a way to improve the existing FDA label system so that people other than number crunchers could start to be mindful of what it is that they're eating.
Then again, warning labels on cigarettes don't usually work. Maybe I'm going off half-cocked.
FDA labels on food packaging are of little use to the average person. If you happen to be the type of person who likes creating spreadsheets, tracking and aggregating data about how many calories you eat and burn in a day might be fun, but for the rest of us, keeping track of all those numbers is too much of a headache to handle.
I'm glad that FDA labels are required by law, because I always favor transparency...but now that we have that data available to us, what are we supposed to do with it all. Does it really make us, as eaters of that food, healthier or better off in some way?
I read an article once about a redesign of packaging for over-the-counter medication, like ibuprofen or acetaminophen, with color coded, simple labels that read "I Have a Headache" or "I Have a Cold" or "I Have Sinus Allergies". The idea was simple: instead of expecting people to remember brand names, have people be able to pick out a medicine based on their affliction. Someone who wants a pain reliever might reach for Tylenol, but that requires that the consumer's brain has the Tylenol brand mapped to pain relief.
Branding experts will tell you that this generic approach to medicine won't work. Brand names are a more effective and trusted shortcut for most people to remember, instead of labeling medicine with the symptoms they treat. Even if that isn't true, it's probably just as well we don't try and foster a society in which people are grabbing the box that says "Headache medicine" without taking the time to figure out what's in it. (Okay, so that's Excedrin slogan...maybe that is the society in which we live.)
But what about for nutritional information? Numbers are a little bit too much for people to handle, but what about color coding the contents of food on the label? Better yet, have colors represent "Good" or "Bad" in terms of percentage of daily allowance. If something is extremely high in sodium, and we know that sodium in high quantities is shown to be correlated with an increase in blood pressure, which is a bad thing, then highlight the information in red. If something has a lot of fiber in it, and fiber intake is, generally, a good thing, then have that labeled in green. Create different color "zones" for each nutritional ingredient listed. You could also create "flags" that appear on items with notoriously bad ingredients, like high-fructose corn syrup.
People don't think in numbers very well, but we are visual creatures. I would think there was a way to improve the existing FDA label system so that people other than number crunchers could start to be mindful of what it is that they're eating.
Then again, warning labels on cigarettes don't usually work. Maybe I'm going off half-cocked.