WASHINGTON, March 1 (UPI) -- Food manufacturers are not thrilled about labeling their products. Full details of food content would not inform but confuse the consumer, they intimate. Packaging would be clogged with impossibly long and complex information whose usefulness would be hard for the untrained customer to assess.
But food providers -- mothers particularly -- would like to know more about what goes into the food they feed their children. And for their children to learn to be aware of what goes into the food they are feeding themselves away from the family table.
They may be wasting their worrying. Food producers may be able to heave a sigh of relief. A report by The Journal of Adolescent Health shows that young people don't really bother about the impact of what they are eating upon their bodies. Even when they read the label and understand perfectly the nutritional value of the product they are about to consume.
Researchers studied 300 boys and girls between the ages of 10 and 19 of mostly Caucasian and African-American ethnicity. They discovered that even if they read food labels it made little impact upon their food choices. The percentage of adolescents who claimed they always read labels was equal to those who said they never did -- 22 percent of participants. More than 56 percent said they read them only sometimes.
But the significant difference lay with the boys. Those who said they always read labels consumed more fat than those who said they did not, and more fat than girls, regardless of their label-reading habits.
Researchers suggested the motive for this was the desire to "beef up" their bodies by consuming more protein, which would lead to the consumption of more fat.
While the recommended daily dietary fat intake is between 20 to 35 percent, the figure for U.S. adolescents sits at around 33.5 percent. Researchers found that African-American adolescents in the study ate more calories from fat than did the Caucasians.
Two studies among adults conducted in the late 1990s showed that the more informative the labeling, the lower the fat intake among adults. But it doesn't seem to have the same affect on adolescents. Not surprisingly for their age, they are affected by habit and care more about flavor and price than they do about nutrition.
What is needed to encourage both adolescents and adults to pay serious attention to labels is a construct that makes them more reader-friendly and informative. It's hard to understand labeling that looks like a graph from a physics book. They can have little meaning to anyone who hasn't had a basic course in nutrition. How much of what appears to be an insignificant percentage of a particular component translates, for instance, into unwanted body fat?
Why not a health warning similar to the surgeon general's screamer on cigarette packages? "This product could make you FAT!" Unlikely to happen. But perhaps such a threat would make food manufacturers think more carefully about their labeling practices.
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