How to Know What You Eat, Really

Helpful organizations and government agencies have been trying to tell us what, exactly, is in our food since 1938, when the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act required that
every processed, packaged food feature the name of the food, its net
weight, and the name and address of its manufacturer or distributor. As this piece in the Washington Post reports, the next effort to tell us what we are about eat came in 1973, when the U.S Food and Drug Administration issued regulations
requiring nutrition labeling on foods containing added nutrients and
those for which the manufacturer made claims about nutritional value or
benefits. And in the 1990s, the FDA
introduced mandatory nutrition labeling for most foods (the ubiquitous
Nutrition Facts panels) standardizing serving sizes and setting uniform
language for health claims.
Now, the Post reports, comes something called the Nutrient Rich Foods Coalition, with the goal of creating a simple coding system to
steer us toward foods that pack the greatest nutritive punch for the
number of calories they contain and — important — the number of
dollars they cost.
The paper reports that the coalition, which includes scientists, communications experts and
representatives of 12 agricultural-commodity food organizations,
including the National Dairy Council, the Wild Blueberry Association of
North America, the Wheat Foods Council and the National Cattlemen’s
Beef Association, hopes to help
people focus on embracing foods that contain lots of nutrients rather
than thinking in terms of excluding foods that contain less-wholesome
ingredients such as trans fats, sodium and added sugars. To learn more, in fact, to learn all about the Nutrient Rich Foods Coalition, visit their website.