Walk down any supermarket aisle and the packaging will reassure you: Low Sodium. No Artificial Flavors. Organic. High Fiber. Immunity Support.<\/p>\n
But a new analysis<\/a> of nearly 150,000 food and beverage products launched in the United States over the past decade, led by\u00a0Miguel G\u00f3mez<\/a>, the Robert G. Tobin professor of food marketing in the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business, and Pei Zhou, a postdoctoral researcher in his lab, suggests that reassurance is often misplaced. The study, which drew on a decade of new-product data from the market research firm Mintel, found that products bearing health-related claims are not only not consistently healthier, they are sometimes less nutritious. Reducing one unhealthy ingredient sometimes means they added more of a different one.<\/p>\n Zhou\u2019s original interest in the topic came from her own shopping experience.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOne day I went to a supermarket, and I noticed there was original flavor and lower-fat cream cheese,\u201d she said. \u201cThey had reduced the fat, but they had more total sugars and more sodium. There are so many label claims on packages. Our main question was whether products with claims are healthier than those without health claims.\u201d<\/p>\n The Cornell team applied the Nutrient Profiling Model, a scoring system developed by the U.K. Food Standards Agency, which \u2013 unlike a single-nutrient claim \u2013 weighs a product’s full nutritional makeup at once, penalizing excess sugar, sodium, saturated fat and calories while rewarding fiber, protein and fruit and vegetable content. It\u2019s the same tool British regulators use to decide which products can be advertised to children.<\/p>\n Applying that lens to the American marketplace, the researchers found that, of the newly launched products they analyzed, two-thirds qualified as less healthy overall even though half of the products had on-package health claims. \u00a0<\/p>\n The trouble, the researchers found, often comes down to trade-offs hidden in the fine print of formulation. A \u201creduced sodium\u201d soda, for instance, is disproportionately likely to make up for it with extra sugar. A \u201cno trans-fat\u201d packaged meal often leans harder on saturated fat and sodium instead. The claim is technically true. The overall nutritional picture, the study suggests, doesn\u2019t necessarily improve, and can sometimes get worse in another direction.<\/p>\n Beverages showed the starkest gaps, with claims like \u201clow sodium,\u201d \u201csugar free\u201d and “low saturated fat” the most likely to diverge from actual nutritional quality. Food products fared somewhat better, with most claims aligning with genuinely improved nutrition \u2013 the notable exception being reduced trans-fat claims, which tracked with higher saturated fat.<\/p>\n Perhaps the most striking finding involved a category of labeling that isn’t regulated as a nutrition claim at all: \u201cnatural.\u201d Terms like organic, non-GMO and whole grain say nothing formally about a product\u2019s sugar, sodium or fat content. Yet prior consumer research cited by the authors, which included Harry Kaiser, the Gellert Family Professor Emeritus in the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and Yuqing Zheng at the University of Kentucky, has repeatedly shown that shoppers read \u201cnatural\u201d as shorthand for \u201chealthy\u201d anyway, a psychological shortcut researchers call the \u201chalo effect.\u201d<\/p>\n These companies are not breaking the law, G\u00f3mez and Zhou said. On-package claims are typically regulated for accuracy about the specific attribute they name \u2013 sodium content, say, or the presence of added vitamins. They\u2019re not required to represent the product\u2019s nutritional profile as a whole. But that gap, the study argues, loses ground for public health.<\/p>\n The findings arrive as federal regulators are already rethinking how nutrition information reaches consumers. The Food and Drug Administration finalized an updated definition of the \u201chealthy\u201d claim in recent years and has proposed a new front-of-package labeling scheme intended to summarize a product\u2019s nutrition profile at a glance \u2013 an approach closer to the systems already used in the U.K., and to mandatory warning labels adopted in Chile and Mexico.<\/p>\n \u201cWe provide some direction for policymakers in our paper,\u201d G\u00f3mez said. \u201cThe general idea is to transition from single claims to a broader nutrient profile style. In countries like Chile or Mexico, they use traffic stop signs to warn consumers about high salt, sugar and fat, and this limits the positioning of products in the supermarket.\u201d<\/p>\n For now, G\u00f3mez and Zhou say, the practical advice for shoppers is unglamorous but familiar: A claim on the front of a box is a hint, not a verdict. The nutrition label on the back \u2013 added sugars, sodium, saturated fat, all of it together \u2013 still tells the fuller story.<\/p>\n It will be an uphill battle, G\u00f3mez fears.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMoving toward a more comprehensive system in which you can evaluate the healthiness profile of products is better for consumers,\u201d he said. \u201cBut it\u2019s hard to implement politically.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Walk down any supermarket aisle and the packaging will reassure you: Low Sodium. No Artificial Flavors. Organic. 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