Life, liberty and the pursuit of pounds

Written by Joe Pisani
Wednesday, 09 March 2011 09:24

Whenever I go to those trendy health-food stores where they sell alfalfa sprouts, crystallized ginger, organic apples and hummus, I get stranded behind people milling around reading labels like they’re in the New York Public Library.

It makes my feeble mind wonder: If so many of us are studying food labels, why is there an epidemic of obesity in America that costs $150 billion a year in health care and lost productivity? Are we reading labels so we can find products with the most saturated fat, sugar and sodium?

Even though I love labels and find them as inspiring as the stock listings in the Financial Times, I don’t understand mumbo-jumbo like calcium propionate and fructo-oligosaccharides and the ubiquitous high-fructose corn syrup, which seems to be the primary ingredient in just about every substance known to modern man, including motor oil.

I grew up in a family that lived on a steady diet of red meat — most notably Italian sausage and sirloin steak - which means we weren’t very health conscious. Now, however, I’m committed to the cause of healthy living even though my favorite foods are chili dogs and Little Debbie baked goods, especially the zebra cakes with cream filling, not to mention Mike and Ike, which are one of those notorious “fat free” candies that are supposedly good for you.

In 1990, when the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act first mandated that nutritional facts appear on product labels, it seemed a new era had dawned. We were on the road to recovery. But now it’s apparent they were about as effective as cancer warnings on cigarettes.

In an attempt to assuage the government’s fears about America’s bad eating habits, the food industry has begun putting labels on the front of products so we won’t be able to ignore the nutritional value in things like real mayonnaise and canned beef stew.

Front-of-package labels, developed by the Grocery Manufacturers Association and the Food Marketing Institute, emphasize the good, the bad and the ugly, and use four icons to identify a product’s calorie content, saturated fat, sodium and total sugar.

But some critics charge the industry is being deceptive, and the Prevention Institute recently released a study that concluded 84 percent of the claims of healthfulness on front-of-package labels are misleading.

Unfortunately, most of us don’t care what’s in the food we eat, and a law requiring chain restaurants to print calorie counts on menus has done nothing to stop teenagers from stuffing their faces with Big Macs and other artery-clogging fast foods.

A study of adolescent eating habits in the New York area showed that even though kids read the calorie information, they chowed down anyway. That’s the American way: Unhealthy life, liberty to eat what we want when we want it and the pursuit of pounds.

Of course, there’s a simpler strategy for a good diet, which requires no label reading — eat fresh fruits and vegetables, fish, almonds, yogurt, a little red wine and a little olive oil. And stay away from the Italian sausage.

Joe Pisani can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

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