Cover Stories: The Fight over Food Labels

By Christine Gorman

Like many a red-blooded American, Olivia Vavreck of Minneapolis loves a good prime rib and a baked potato smothered in butter. But ever since she checked into the hospital with chest pains last year and learned that her cholesterol level was in the upper stratosphere, the 57-year-old office manager has tried to cut down on the fat in her diet. Easier said than done. Although the labels on every other product in the grocery store promised nutritional nirvana, Vavreck found herself floundering in quagmires of grease, salt, corn syrup and other dubious digestibles. "I thought I was doing pretty well because I was always buying the stuff that said 'low cholesterol' or 'no cholesterol,' " she recalls. "But then I found out that the fat content in some of them is so high that they're still bad for you."

About half of all consumers say they depend on labels to determine which food to buy. "I see so many women reading labels now, they run the risk of having their pocketbooks stolen," says Jane Bohanan, an Atlanta homemaker. Yet a casual stroll down the aisles of a supermarket reveals just how often Bohanan and other shoppers are being shamelessly deceived.

-- Budget Gourmet Light and Healthy Salisbury Steak, which is labeled "low fat," derives 45% of its total calories from fat.

-- Diet Coke contains more than the one heavily advertised calorie per can (so does Diet Pepsi).

-- There is no real fruit -- just fruit flavors -- in Post Fruity Pebbles.

-- Honey Nut Cheerios provides less honey than sugar and more salt than nuts.

-- Mrs. Smith's Natural Juice Apple Pie contains artificial preservatives. The word natural refers to the fruit juice used to make the pie.

If you can't trust Mrs. Smith, whom can you trust? "The labels are all distorted," says Donna Krone, 41, an attorney in New York City who tries to sandwich a healthy diet into her high-pressure workweek. "The whole mess makes me want to just give up and order in Chinese food."

More and more shoppers have awakened to the scope of the deception and reacted with disgust and contempt for product labels. Fully 40% of consumers claim they are highly skeptical of what they read on the packages in their grocery carts. And medical experts see a distinct danger in the muddled messages. "For someone with chronic heart disease, hypertension or diabetes, the current manufacturers' labels can be downright dangerous," says Gail Levey, a spokeswoman for the American Dietetic Association. People with high blood pressure, for example, should be wary of falling for Stouffer's Lean Cuisine, which proudly boasts "Never more than a gram of sodium" in its print advertisements. While the claim is true, the implication -- that this is a very low-salt product -- is not. Nutritionists normally measure sodium in milligrams (thousandths of a gram), not grams. Several diet delights from Stouffer's contain almost half the amount of sodium allowed daily on a typical salt-restricted diet.

Throughout the past decade, federal food watchdogs napped to the sounds of this cacophony of false claims. The Food and Drug Administration virtually invited abuse by lifting its own long-standing ban against health promotions on food labels. But the deregulatory winds have shifted, and the sleeping sentry has awakened. In a blaze of whistle blowing, the FDA, headed by tough new commissioner David Kessler, is cracking down. The agency has begun seizing products with misleading labels, developing new guidelines for nutritional information and exposing hollow health claims.

Kessler's utterly novel vision: that consumers should easily be able to tell what they are ingesting by reading what is written on food labels. "I'm not one to tell people what to eat," he says. "But for those who want to use information, for those who really care or are at risk of heart disease, we have an obligation to make sure the information is conveyed in a useful way."

Already Kessler has fired several salvos at deceivers. First hit was Procter & Gamble. The conglomerate had received numerous letters from the FDA complaining about the labeling of its Citrus Hill Fresh Choice orange juice, which is made from concentrate. In April, Kessler instructed his inspectors to publicly seize 2,000 cases of the juice. Two days and many headlines later, the company, based in Cincinnati, agreed to remove the term fresh from its label. Soon after, executives at Ragu Foods of Trumbull, Conn., consented to drop the offending word from their Ragu Fresh Italian pasta sauces, which, like many other prepared sauces, are heat processed. In May the FDA ordered that the "no-cholesterol" claim be removed from Best Foods' Mazola Corn Oil and HeartBeat Canola Oil, made by Great Foods of America. Like all plant oils, these products never contained cholesterol.

Just last week Kessler's FDA took aim at juice producers by proposing new regulations that would force them to disclose for the first time exactly how much and what kinds of juice are in their fruit-juice drinks. Such a rule would reveal, for instance, that Veryfine drinks contain only 10% fruit juice. It would also inform consumers that even the claims made by many cranberry and raspberry drinks to be "100% juice" are somewhat misleading: they are filled with deflavored apple or grape extracts that are little more than natural sugar water.

Congress supplied Kessler with the ammunition for his consumers' crusade last fall, when it passed the Nutritional Labeling and Education Act. The law, which sailed through both houses unopposed, requires new, straightforward labels for all foods, including fresh fruits and vegetables. While the changes will not become mandatory until May 1993, the FDA has until November of this year to come up with proposals for what the new labels should say. In addition, public pressure is mounting -- from such groups as the American Association of Retired Persons, the American Heart Association and the National Parent-Teacher Association -- to revamp the labels on meat and poultry, which are regulated separately by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

While the nutrition act does not apply to restaurants, where a growing number of Americans are eating many of their meals, some proprietors have jumped on the bandwagon with knife and fork in hand. Jeff Prince, senior director of the National Restaurant Association, says that labeling the menus at table-service restaurants probably will not work in most cases, but 80% of fast-food franchises have begun to provide nutrition information. "The recession has driven a lot of this," Prince explains. "When a significant portion of the population wants ingredient information, that number can make the difference between success and failure."

Kessler is waging a crusade well suited to the 1990s: it involves no new money. In fact, during the past decade the FDA has been given a host of new and taxing responsibilities, including the oversight of the generic-drug industry, the evaluation of hundreds of AIDS treatments and now the redesigning of food labels. Yet the agency's budget has not increased proportionally. "We've had to divert people from laboratory work, and we've brought people in from the field," says Ed Scarbrough, the chief architect of the FDA's new labeling program. He believes that the task of coming up with revised guidelines would require 120 people. He has just 30.

The relabeling effort may cost food manufacturers $600 million during the next two decades. They will pass on the tab to consumers, but fortunately it is very low: only about 11 cents for every $100 worth of groceries, according to government estimates. Even the most conservative projections place the potential benefit from reduced medical costs and increased productivity at $3.6 billion. If everyone who reads labels were to adopt a healthier diet, the savings could jump to more than $100 billion.

Americans have a long history of prodding government to act when public health and dietary issues are at stake. Popular outrage over the Chicago meat- packing scandals, revealed in Upton Sinclair's 1906 classic, The Jungle, gave rise to both a meat-inspection law and the predecessor to the modern FDA. The discovery, during World War II, that many draftees suffered from beriberi and other vitamin B deficiencies led to the government's creation of the Recommended Dietary Allowances for vitamins and minerals.

But times have changed. "Now nearly everyone agrees that there are virtually no deficiencies in the American diet," Scarbrough says. "The problems today are from overnutrition." Particularly overdosing on fat, cholesterol and overall calories. As a result, health professionals are more concerned about chronic maladies related to overnutrition, such as heart disease, cancer, some forms of diabetes and obesity. They no longer simply count calories but look at the composition of the entire diet.

The main culprit, everyone concurs, is fat -- not just the fat that bulges the waistline but the fat that lurks in most high-protein and lusciously rich foods. Health-conscious eaters who sought out high-quality protein and dieted by discarding the buns from their hamburgers, it turned out, were doing just about everything wrong. Americans typically get about 40% of their daily calories from fat, instead of the 30% recommended. The body is particularly efficient at turning excess saturated fat -- the type found in meats and whole-milk dairy products -- into the arteries' archenemy, cholesterol. This villainous substance should therefore account for no more than 10% of the daily caloric intake. For a healthy man who consumes 2,500 calories a day, that translates into about 28 g, or the equivalent of half a stick of butter.

Spaghetti lovers, take note. Carbohydrates, particularly the complex ones found in pasta, cereals and legumes, should make up at least 55% of the diet. Although the evidence is not as solid as the tie between excess fat and heart disease, scientists now believe that loading up on fiber-rich complex carbs (like whole-wheat bread or bran cereal) while cutting back on fat may reduce the risk of breast, colon and other cancers. In addition, health- conscious citizens should keep their dietary cholesterol intake to less than 300 mg, the equivalent of a little more than one egg yolk a day, and their salt intake to less than 2,400 mg, or 1 1/4 tsp.

Regulators have targeted three major areas of label abuse: deceptive definitions, hazy health claims and slippery serving sizes. Phase I of their program, already under way, covers fresh fruit, vegetables, seafood and other edibles that have never before been subject to nutritional labeling requirements. Grocers will not be asked to plaster ingredients labels on an apple or haddock; instead, they will post nutritional information at their produce bins and fish counters. In addition, the FDA is under congressional orders to standardize the requirements for such terms as juice and juice drink.

Scheduled for completion this fall, Phase II will focus on making labels mean exactly what they say. Among the worst culprits are products that claim to be 80%, 90% or even 99% fat free. Although technically correct, the labels are misleading because virtually all manufacturers base their calculations not on the composition of calories, but on weight, including water, which occurs naturally in most food. For example, Louis Rich Turkey Bologna accurately claims to be "82% fat free, 18% fat." It sounds perfect for people who are trying to keep their fat consumption below 30% a day. Yet each 60-calorie slice, which weighs 28 g (or 1 oz.), contains 5 g of fat. Since each gram of ( fat accounts for nine calories, 75% -- not 18% -- of the calories in a slice of Louis Rich Turkey Bologna come from fat.

It is hard enough to find time to go shopping without having to worry about taking along a personal computer, so the FDA is considering requiring labels that include the total number of calories as well as how many calories are derived from fat. Yet the proposed requirement could end up trading one kind of confusion for another. "We're a little concerned that the consumer won't know how to interpret this number," says Guy Johnson, nutrition director for Grand Metropolitan's food sector. "Let's say you have a product that has 30 calories from fat, which would mean roughly 3 g of fat. That would basically be a pretty low-fat product. However, if people see the 30 and think of it as percent of calories from fat, they may needlessly avoid the food."

Under Kessler's direction, the FDA is modifying the order in which ingredients are listed on a label. Traditionally, components have been listed in descending order by weight. That enables manufacturers to play games with sweeteners, listing each type (corn syrup, sugar, honey, and so on) separately so they will appear in the lower part of the list. Kessler wants the sweeteners to be grouped together to enable a shopper to tell at a glance just how sweet those granola bars really are.

Phase III of the FDA plan, which begins next year, will provide standard definitions for such descriptive terms as high-fiber, low fat and light and certify health claims listed on product packages. This phase will also address the tricks associated with serving size. Until the federal agency jumped into the fray, private physicians and nutritionists had been fighting a lonely rearguard action in this realm of superslim slivers and oversize wedges. A manufacturer wishing to boost the nutrient value of a cereal, for example, simply bases the label on an oversize portion. If low calories are the object, the portion becomes minuscule. Take, for example, Entenmann's fat-free Chocolate Loaf Cake, which boasts a scant 70 calories per 1-oz. serving. No one with a sweet tooth would ever cut the cake this small, argues Dr. Brian Levy, who treats diabetics at New York University Medical Center. "It is physically almost impossible and emotionally unsatisfying to eat just 1 oz.," he says. Haagen-Dazs markets a frozen yogurt that is lower in calories than its ice cream. But to make the yogurt seem even less fattening, the label lists a smaller serving size: 3 oz. for a helping of yogurt, 4 oz. for ice cream.

Although business executives grumble about the costs of relabeling, many manufacturers are philosophical about the reform movement. "I don't think the whole industry would be going through these changes without pressure from consumers," says Bob Pusey, a spokesman for Calistoga Mineral Water. "This is not a fad. The thing we're all going to have to get used to is that the consumer has a right to know and wants to know what is in food." The producers' major concern: that the FDA's new rules be consistent and easy to implement. "Already we're hearing about a number of exemptions," says DeeAnn Campbell, a vice president with Del Monte Foods in San Francisco. "We just want to know clearly what does and does not have to be done."

As always, the real test will be whether consumers find the new labels truly helpful. The packagers will also have to win back the public's abused trust. If Americans can depend on the information on the new labels, then they will be able to take the first, least expensive step toward better health through a better diet. They will also be able to discover at last the true answer to that age-old question, What are we eating for dinner?

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: TIME Chart by Joe Lertola

Text by Janice M. Horowitz

CAPTION: WHAT YOU SHOULD LOOK FOR

The FDA is considering several new designs for food labels. Here is a guide to a proposal favored by many consumer groups.

With reporting by Marc Hequet/Minneapolis, Janice M. Horowitz/New York and Dick Thompson/Washington