The Food and Drug Administration has some big news: the new food product nutrition labels will feature calorie counts in larger font!
Yep. Larger font. This way, you can have a bold look at how many grams of poison you could potentially put into your system…
Come on, FDA! I know you guys don’t work as if you run a profit and loss statement, but a larger font?! That “milestone” is either lazy or disingenuous.
Let’s revisit the label problem from the perspective of a high-end product design company, and ask a fundamental question: what do consumers hope to achieve when reading a nutrition label?
How many calories and how much fat the food contains? Nah, that’s looking at the small picture.
Sure, vitamin, mineral, fat and protein content numbers are important, but most nutrition-conscious consumers would ultimately like to know – much to the chagrin of many food companies – whether or not the food has enough nutrition in it!
What if the FDA created a composite nutritional content score, based on a number of factors including health risk and quantity, and required all food companies to place the score prominently on the packaging?
Here’s a bonus which might get a policymaker assassinated for suggesting it – what if the food label contained a percentage rating of how much processed or artificial ingredients make up the food in the packaging? If my theory holds, it would be virtually impossible for a 100%-healthy food to contain 100% artificial and processed ingredients.
For example, Most sodas contain no ingredients of value to the body that I can think of, so the nutritional “index,” in lack of a better term, is likely zero.
And while I expect the percentage of artificial ingredients to outweigh any other ingredients in a bottle of soda, save for water, let’s say the processed or artificial ingredients percentage was 10.
The only thing that’s left is to present the math: Zero x 10 percent = Zero.
Put that in large font.
You Big Food fans shouldn’t be upset. Some of you will not be deterred from buying something with a zero on it.
But at least all of us would finally be in a position to make an informed choice…
song currently stuck in my head: “funknroll” – prince
mentalunrest.com 