Misleading Food Labels

From: Misleading Food Labels: An Ethical Issue? (WSJ, 2003); An Insider's Guide to Food Labels (Businessweek, 2006)

Many shoppers rely on food labels to help them pick nutritious and low-calorie foods, but a closer look at labels shows many are misleading, making products seem far healthier or less fattening than they are.

Misleading Serving Sizes

• Most people consider a bag of chips or a bottle of soda as one serving. But on the food label it can be listed as two or three servings, understating the calorie information on the label so people are unaware of what they are actually about to consume. The label on a 20-ounce bottle of soda, for instance, claims the package contains 2.5 servings at 100 calories each, even though the vast majority of people will consume the 250 calories at once.

• By manipulating the serving-size portion of the label, popular cooking sprays, made of 100% fat, can boast they are fat-free and calorie-free. This is because the FDA states that any product with less than 0.5 grams of fat per serving can claim to be fat-free. So Pam cooking spray says a "serving" of the product equals just 0.266 grams – or a spray of one-third of a second. Most people coat the entire pan, with no way of knowing how many calories they are really adding. ConAgra Foods, the maker of Pam, says the product is formulated so that food absorbs less fat when cooking with oil or butter.

• In the last decade, food companies have in many cases expanded the amount in packages that many consumers see as single servings. For instance, a king-size, 3.14-ounce bag of plain M&Ms has 220 calories per serving -- but two servings in each package. A 4-ounce Mini Oreo Go-Pak has four servings of 140 calories each -- which totals 560 calories.

• A package of Maruchan's Oriental Ramen noodles -- a mainstay of the undergraduate diet -- lists 190 calories and 900 milligrams of sodium per serving on its label, but few consumers notice that each package actually contains two servings. Grandma's vanilla minicookies, a vending machine staple made by Frito-Lay, claims 150 calories, but eat the entire bag, as most people do, and that's 300 calories.

• Flexibility in labeling rules make bigger packages, which are still often eaten in a single-serving, look less fattening. For instance, Stouffer's white-meat chicken pot pie has 740 calories per serving when sold in a single- serving 10-ounce box. But when sold in a 16-ounce box, it lists two 8- ounce servings -- at 570 calories per serving. In single-serving packages, companies are allowed by FDA rules to use sizes as small as half or as large as double the standard serving, making different packages confusing to consumers trying to count calories.

• The most misleading food labels are often found