The obesity epidemic in the United States is worse than it has ever been before. At the time of writing this article it stands at 67% overweight for the entire population, with 35.7% being obese and 17% of youths being obese. This problem has created a weight conscious country and where there’s a demand, there’s big money to be made at the expense of the uneducated. Food companies have powerful marketing departments working hand-in-hand with powerful legal department with close communication with government regulators like the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and the U.S Department of Agreculture (USDA). Their number one goal is to take advantage of every legal gray area, power the marketing machine and get the money out of your pockets.
They look for the biggest niches and trends and test every word, color, shape, font size and type to entice you to grab their products and place it into your shopping cart. Does the word “natural” mean anything to you? How about the word “organic”. Are you willing to pay more for eggs from “cage-free”, “pastured” or “vegetarian-fed” chickens? How about beef that’s “grass-fed” or “grass-finished”? Common phrases you might see on packaged foods are “gluten-free”, “fat-free”, “all-natural” and “GMO-free”. These are just a small sample of phrases that may or may not have government regulations and if they are regulated, they often have gray areas that companies greedily exploit.
Processed food companies have realized that it’s not good business sense to make truly healthy products. It’s far more profitable to create front-of-package and persuasive marketing to create health halos around less-than-healthy foods to trip us up when we’re genuinely trying to do better for ourselves and our families. Yomi Freedhoff, MD, author of “The Diet Fix: Why Diets Fail and How To Make Yours Work” says “If the front of a package needs to convince you of the healthfulness of its contents, there’s a darn good chance its contents aren’t healthful”. The average consumer makes over 200 food related decisions per day with most of those decisions mindlessly being made on autopilot. In stark contrast to consumer mindlessness is the sophisticated marketing savvy juggernaut of the food marketing industry and top advertisers in the U.S marketing media.
In 2012, $116 million was spent marketing fruits and vegetables. That may sound impressive at first until you discover that $4.6 billion was spent marketing fast food, and marketers are becoming increasingly likely to use health claims on their packages to draw in a larger audience. Science has proven that descriptive labels with evocative phrases such as “Succulent Italian Seafood Fillet” sounds more appealing with more taste expectation than “Seafood Filet”. Some of the more deceptive health halo effect phrases boldly printed on front-of-package labels are “rich in Omega-3”, “supports immunity”, “low in fat”, “pesticide-free”, “antioxidant-laden”, etc., give consumers the assumption of a product that’s lower in calories or the more of it they eat, the better it is for them. Companies even go as far as doing brain scans on various demographics and measuring neurological responses to advertisements and marketing phrases. One easy way of protecting yourself against the deception of front end labeling would be to take the time to look at nutrition labels on the back of the box.
This article would be far too long to go trough all the most popular marketing phrases and their exploited government gray area regulations but it would cover many of them. There are online resources you can use if you’d like to learn more, such as
www.greenerchoices.com and
www.megansenger.com. Another very simple and easy way to stay away from marketing deception is to stay away from processed packaged foods, do your shopping on the perimeter of the super market and learn to cook your own healthy unprocessed meals. One of the more well known gimmicks used by marketing companies is the fact that an ingredient in a serving less than 0.5 grams can be listed as 0 grams so companies reduce serving sizes until that minimum is reached.
Here are examples of some regulated phrases commonly exploited by food marketers.
Natural – The word natural is used to help sell more than $40 billion dollars a year in food products. Nearly 60% of food shoppers look for the word “natural” during their food shopping and nearly two-thirds of these shoppers believe that it means no artificial ingredients, pesticides or genetically modified organisms (GMOs). Unfortunately, according to the FDA, the word natural is devoid of meaning and foods under FDA jurisdiction (produce and many packaged foods), “natural” and “all-natural” is meaningless. For foods under (USDA) jurisdiction, (animal products), natural does have some meaning. It means processing must be kept to a bare minimum and it can’t contain artificial ingredients. The phrase “naturally-raised” does have some extra meaning. It means that livestock raised for meat can’t contain growth promotants or antibiotics.
Organic – The sale of organic products is continually increasing to the tune of $34 billion dollars a year spread across over 17,000 organic food businesses. There are some government regulations surrounding this word, but it should be noted that these regulations don’t apply to seafood and aquiculture. For all other foods, it means that irradiation, sewage sludge, synthetic fertilizers, prohibited pesticides and GMOs can’t be used in the crops that bare the USDA organic seal. For livestock, organic means allowing access to graze outdoors, organic feed and no growth hormones. The word organic should not be confused with better than organic, beyond organic or more than organic which has no government regulation.
Low-fat, Fat-free, and Reduced Fat – These phrases help food manufactures bring in a whopping $64 billion dollars per year, but each phrase comes with its own deception. The central deception that all phrases share is that consumers are led to think that less fat means less calories. When companies reduce fat, they usually add sugar to preserve taste so product with less fat may have even more calories than before. The second deception is the fact that a company can list a product as fat-free if a serving has less than 0.5 grams of fat per serving. The regulations for low-fat is a product with less than 3 grams of fat per serving. The regulation for reduced fat is not the same for low fat. The only qualification for reduced fat is to have at least 25% less fat than the full fat version.
Grass-fed, Free-range and Cage Free – These 3 terms refer to livestock and also come with deceptions. The only requirement for animal products to be labeled as grass-fed is for livestock to have access to mothered milk, stored or foraged hay, grass or greens anytime during their lifetime. Animals also must have access to pasture anytime during their growing cycle. A very easy standard to meet to increase value and price. Be mindful for phrases like green-fed or grass-finished which has no regulation. The term free-range only applies to poultry and it only means that a sheltered flock has unlimited access to food, water and the outdoors during the production cycle. Animals also have access to going outside the property, but the quality, size and duration animals are allowed to spend outside is not specified. Cage-free is similar to free-range but there are no regulations for letting animals outside the facility. They may not be in cages but they could be in a very overcrowded area.
