Smart Choices: Coming to a supermarket near you

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Check out the Fooducate blog for an interesting post on the Smart Choices food-labeling program, which launches this summer. Devised by the food industry, it places a green check mark on the packages of foods that meet the scheme’s definition of a better, healthier choice.

Fooducate lists six reasons why Smart Choices won’t help shoppers. For example:

‘No Trust. Smart Choices is a program sponsored by the food industry. Food manufacturers need to show growing profits. to do that, they need to sell us more food, not less....’

And:

‘Lenient Benchmark. Some of the criteria chosen by the program are a bit too liberal. For example, 12 grams of sugar per serving of cereal is the equivalent of 3 teaspoons. Yet a sugary breakfast cereal toting this amount is a Smart Choice, as long as it is fortified with vitamins and minerals.’

He gives the program credit, however, for offering a website where consumers can check out criteria.

The blogger favors other food-rating systems over Smart Choices, such as the British traffic light labeling system that indicates -- with a green light -- when foods are good on nutritional criteria (fat, say, or sugar) but also when they’re bad. He also prefers the NuVal system, which gives a food a score between 1 and 100 (with 100 being best) depending on a variety of factors such as salt, fat, sugars and more.

-- Rosie Mestel