Nutrition Facts Label
Food labels provide the consumers with the necessary information on serving size, nutrient information, calories, and daily values. It is created to make the choice of products easier and moreover, to let the consumers understand what food is healthier. In that way, it is extremely important that the information on the nutrition facts label would be comprehensible and consumers would understand it.
In the article “Health officials: Food label changes not enough” published by the USA Today (2014) the authors state that in spite of the fact that nutrition facts label give a lot of information, they do not tell people whether a food is good for them. The labels shall have clearer statements of good and harmful ingredients. In that way, Food and Drug Administration proposed two versions of the improved labels. According to the article, the FDA did not do a complete work and there is still some place for positive development. The authors state that nutrition facts labels require such changes as an indication of the overall nutrition value, making ingredient lists clearer, creating a daily value for sugar, putting labels on the front, too, and giving the label some context (Jalonick & Neergaard, 2014).
At the same time, many researchers and scientists are interested in this issue. The researchers from the University of California (2012) conducted a study to understand how and how well people process information on the nutrition facts labels while evaluating whether food is healthy. The researchers tested 75 younger and older adults by asking them to compare to food nutrition labels and decide which of them is more healthful. The authors of the study noted the information processing strategies by using the eye tracking methodology, which allowed to monitor the eye movements. During the study, there were also considered such factors as age, knowledge, and motivation. Results showed that the choice of a healthier food is not related to age but is closely linked to the knowledge and motivation. It means that people pay a lot of attention to the food issues and it is necessary to make the food nutrition labels more informative (Miller & Cassady, 2012).
The authors of the article “Food Label Use and Its Relation to Dietary Intake among US Adults” (2010) examined how useful are food nutrition labels for consumers. First of all, researchers conducted a survey to understand how many people actually use these labels and it has been found that 61.6% of participants pay attention to them. The other aim was to understand whether consumers know what the data on the labels mean and whether they can interpret this data to find out whether the food is healthy. The study involved 10 348 participants and showed that women with higher income and greater education pay more attention to food labels (Ollberding, Wolf, & Contento, 2010).
The both conducted studies are extremely useful for the government and food producers to understand whether there are any gaps in food nutrition labels and consumers’ knowledge about the …