Smart Choices Nutrition Labels Investigated by FDA

By Kelly Turner on November 2nd, 2009

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The FDA has made an announcement that they plan to investigate misleading food labels on prepackaged foods.

Coincidentally, *cough cough* three days after federal regulators revealed their plan to crack down on potentially misleading food labels, the Smart Choices program, which has received a lot of scrutiny for their choices in healthy food items, voluntarily “postpone[d] active operations.”

You’ll still see Smart Choices at the grocery store, as those products who were already given the label will probably continue to use them, but no new products will be given the green check, at least for the time being.

The FDA didn’t single out the Smart Choices program, but FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg stated that some products bearing the Smart Choice logo “are almost 50 percent sugar.”

The Smart Choices program was meant to help consumers make healthy choices at a glance, and to educate those not familiar with FDA regulated nutrition labels which can be confusing.  The Smart Choice logo is a green check mark that appears on the front of prepackaged food products to indicate a healthy choice.

Where those check marks are popping up, however, leaves the health conscious consumer with a bad taste in their mouth. Kellogg’s Fruit Loops, Frosted Flakes and Keebler Cookie Crunch, among others, have been given the check, even though they contain more than 25% calories from sugar per serving. How does the program justify this? They claim the sugary cereals were given an exception because they are better nutritionally than other common breakfast foods, like donuts, waffles and Pop Tarts.

So, under that logic, everything can get a check as long as there is something else out there that is more unhealthy.

Smart Choices probably isn’t going to go away anytime soon, so its important for you to realize labels like this are just another form of marketing. The only way you can tell for sure if something is healthy, is to read the real nutrition label. For more info on how to properly read a nutrition label, see www.fda.org.