Peanut Butter. Seems really basic, yes? Just made up of peanuts and a little extra oil to make it creamy. In fact, the ingredients in Laura Scudder’s old fashioned peanut butter is peanuts and 1% or less of salt. But what about other brands of peanut butter. When looking at labels in the grocery score I looked at both Skippy’s peanut butter and Jif. Skippy’s peanut butter’s ingredients include: peanuts, sugar hydrogenated vegetable oils (cottonseed, soybean and rapeseed) and salt. When I looked at the label for Jif peanut butter it said: peanuts, sugar, 2% or less of: molasses, fully hydrogenated vegetable oils, mono and diglycerides and salt. Personally, if I hadn’t been reading the labels of the different brands of peanut butter I would have just grabbed a jar of Skippy because it’s what my mom gave me as a kid. But after reading the labels I am much more likely to grab a jar of Laura Scudder’s because it has the least amount of mysterious ingredients and hydrogenated oils.
I was not a huge fan of reading labels while shopping for food but recently I have been more willing to take my time shopping for healthier options of the normal foods that I eat. When I started reading labels I realized what things I was putting into my body that I had no idea what they were. Like in Jif peanut butter, I have absolutely no clue what mono and diglycerides are. After doing some research I found out that they are fatty acids used to blend together ingredients that wouldn’t normally blend well. Why would I want to put mysterious fatty acids in my system when I could just choose a more natural option with no mysterious ingredients?
I believe one of the reasons that people might not read food product labels as much is because of our fast paced lifestyle. Everything we do, we want to get done fast. Going to the grocery store is always thought of as a chore and a hassle. I think that’s part of the reason that people don’t take their time in looking at what they are really eating. But if people took the time to read the labels of the foods that they’re putting into their grocery baskets they might make different decisions in what they decide to buy.
In my own research I polled 50 people chosen at random from the ages of 17 to 60 from a variety of locations in the United States. I asked them if they knew how to read nutrition labels, if they read nutrition labels, if they would be interested in learning more about nutrition labels and if reading nutrition labels would effect what products they would consume. 50% of the people I polled said that they do read nutrition labels and 40% said that they only sometimes read nutrition labels. When asked if they would be interested in learning how to read nutrition labels 32% said yes, and another 60% said that they already knew how to read them but would want to learn more about them.
I think it’s really important for us to know how to read nutrition labels and pay attention to the ingredients being put in certain food products because of all the mysterious chemicals that are being used to make certain products look or taste more appealing. Why should you care if chemicals are being put in food products? Well, if you eat a certain product that has a chemical like diglyeride or red dye 40, there’s a possibility that you could be allergic to that chemical and have an allergic reaction to it. Not many people think that they could be allergic to something as common as red dye 40, but it’s not extremely rare. If you have a more obscure allergy, like red dye 40, then not reading food labels is like putting yourself into a lottery, but instead of money, you win an allergic reaction, or the worst possibility, death. I don’t think you would want to risk dying just to eat a red M&M.
There are a lot of different ways you can learn how to read food labels. The American Heart Association has a great article on how to read and understand food labels. This article is focused more on the nutrition facts than the ingredients, but being about to read and understand the nutrition facts is just as important as just reading the ingredients in different food products. When I read the article for the first time, I had no idea that if a food claimed to be calorie free it means that one serving of the product contains less than 5 calories. Or if a product says it’s sugar free, it really means that it has less than 0.5 grams if sugar. If we just read the front of product labels, then we don’t realize what some products really mean when they say “SUGAR FREE” in big, brightly colored letters.
Another way that people can learn about nutrition labeling is the Growing Great program. This program was started in 1999 by Marika Bergsund in the Manhattan Beach Unified School District in Southern California. It began as just a demonstration garden at 1 of the 5 elementary schools in the district. In 2001 the California Department of Education granted $50,000 to expand the program into all 5 elementary schools in the district. Since then the program has expanded to over 30 schools and they have launched Online Nutrition Education Training to help the program expand worldwide. The programs include lessons in teaching how much a serving size really is, the difference between high quality and low quality fuels, label reading and a ton more. I personally was able to experience this program when I was in elementary school and I loved it. They made the lessons very interesting and fun but at the same time extremely educational. This program is more focused towards elementary schools and younger aged children, but I think that is the best time to learn about nutrition labels, serving sizes, how to really fuel your body well and all the things to do to be a healthy eater.
While these are only 2 of the ways we can learn more about nutrition labels I think they are the easiest or more educating options. While Growing Great is still expanding in California, I think there is a great chance that it will keep expanding. But if we did just slow down a little and educate ourselves, we could make healthier choices in the foods we eat one food label at a time.
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