Improving the design of nutrition labels to promote healthier food choices and reasonable portion sizes

Abstract

Accurate and easy-to-understand nutrition labeling is a worthy public health goal that should be considered an important strategy among many to address obesity and poor diet. Updating the Nutrition Facts Panel on packaged foods, developing a uniform front-of-package labeling system and providing consumers with nutrition information on restaurant menus offer important opportunities to educate people about food's nutritional content, increase awareness of reasonable portion sizes and motivate consumers to make healthier choices. The aims of this paper were to identify and discuss: (1) current concerns with nutrition label communication strategies; (2) opportunities to improve the communication of nutrition information via food labels, with a specific focus on serving size information; and (3) important future areas of research on nutrition labeling as a tool to improve diet. We suggest that research on nutrition labeling should focus on ways to improve food labels' ability to capture consumer attention, reduce label complexity and convey numeric nutrition information in simpler and more meaningful ways, such as through interpretive food labels, the addition of simple text, reduced use of percentages and easy-to-understand presentation of serving size information.

Assessing nutrition and other claims on food labels: a repeated cross-sectional analysis of the Canadian food supply

“…Nutrition labelling has been included by the World Health Organization as an intervention strategy to provide consumers meaningful information on the nutritional content of foods and to help them select more healthier ones [2,3]. One can argue that well-designed food labels, with accurate and easy-to-understand nutrition information, can have the potential to nudge consumers towards informed healthy food choices [4][5][6][7][8]; although, others have suggested that nutrition claims are being used more as marketing tools by industry [8,9]. Moreover, products with nutrition claims on food labels could be perceived as "healthier" by consumers [10].…”

A randomized trial testing the efficacy of modifications to the nutrition facts table on comprehension and use of nutrition information by adolescents and young adults in Canada

“…22,39,40 Proposed changes to nutrition labels are under review in Canada and include standardizing servingsize information within similar product categories and adding an interpretational statement defining what is a little or a lot of the % DV. 22 Our research suggests that both of these modifications to the NFt may help young Canadians interpret NFt information when choosing foods, compare information between similar products, and mathematically manipulate numeric information to understand the nutritional content of multiple servings of a product.…”

Forefronts in portion size. An overview and synthesis of a roundtable discussion

“…The ability to estimate serving size with some accuracy is further challenged by low levels of literacy 12,13 . Thus, even when consumers use nutrition information and are trained to look for this on packaging, many fail to identify the amount of a single serving, especially when the pack contains more than one serving 10 . The definition of the term "portion size" stems primarily from the research literature, and has often been used to refer to the amount of food offered to adult consumers 15 and children 4 as well as the amount selected.…”