Wilbur O. Atwater was an agricultural scientist who was instrumental in developing the concept of the "calorie" as a unit of energy, and he measured the caloric content of thousands of food items.
Fast forward to the early 1900s, the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed in the United States, which required food manufacturers to label their products with a list of ingredients.
Fast forward a few more decades, to the the 1990s, and the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA) was passed. Nutrition labeling becomes a requirement on most packaged foods, and the common nutrition labels we have today are born.
These moments are cherrypicked, but demonstrate that labeling food has been on the human consciousness for a while now. And I love it; the fact that we make an attempt to know what we eat is great. But how effective is it in influencing food decisions?
What types of food labels are there?
In the US, we’re used to the nutritional form label on the side or back of the box. But most governments around the world think the answer is Front-of-Package Labeling (FOPL). Basically, these are the first glimpses into a food item’s nutrition, and are put on the front of food packaging to help persuade consumers in making better buying decisions.
Currently, there are a few different designs for FOPLs across the world, ranging from color-heavy to text-heavy depending on the strategy used. The matrix below shows a two-dimensional view of how we could classify the characteristics of common food labels. Direct labels, for instance, are more focused in their messaging as opposed to being neutral. And interpretive labels are less transcriptive, instead summarizing information and designating categories for foods.
When studies have looked into which labels are most effective, they’ve found promising results in NutriScore and Traffic Light designed labels in having people increase purchases of healthy food. Warning labels helped discouraged unhealthy purchasing behavior.
How do we determine nutritional value?
Basically, the goal of nutrition labels is to collect information about a particular food sample, and calculate the makeup of certain nutritional chemicals based on those collections. We then have guidelines that let us know how those totals fit into different health contexts.
To start calculating the nutritional information of something like, let’s say, a jar of tomatoes, we would start with the list of ingredients (citric acid, maybe some sugar, etc). Once we have that list of ingredients, we then have two options: we can calculate our batch of tomatoes ourselves using biochemistry, or use an existing database.
1) Calculating nutrition in a lab
Let’s start with calculating it ourself.
To collect that information, we’d probably send a sample of our jar of tomatoes over to a lab, assuming that the other batches are grown in similar conditions. If our product is fried, coated, or salted, we’ll more than likely need to get our nutritional information determined by a lab due to the product’s complexity.
That lab has a plethora of biochemical techniques and methods that can give it nutritional info on vitamins, macro and micronutrients, so it’s really their choice. Since protein is high in nitrogen, it can be the Kjeldahl method. For fat, we can be nuclear magnetic resonance or the Soxhlet method. We got options.
2) Using a database
To streamline the process of creating nutrition labels, food manufacturers often use databases. These databases contain information about the nutritional content of various foods, which can be used to create accurate labels quickly and efficiently.
One such database is the USDA National Nutrient Database, which contains information on over 8,000 different foods, and saves small business owners a lot of time when it comes to calculating nutritional labels. Not to mention the FDA allows a margin of error of 20%, so it’s not a huge deal if your numbers are a little off.