An Urban's Rural View

A close encounter in a hotel shower has made me think again about the fine print on food labels.

I'll get to the encounter in a minute. First, the labels.

I've always believed the more information disclosed on them, the better. I want to know how many calories, how much sodium, how much fiber. GMOs don't worry me -- I'm against "Contains Genetically Engineered Ingredients" warnings -- but I'd welcome it if the fine print were to include a list of GE ingredients and the percentage of the product they represent.

Even after my close encounter, "the more the better" seems right to me. But I admit, that moment in the shower gives me pause.

Understand, a few months ago I had cataract surgery. Along with it the ophthalmologist corrected my astigmatism but left me farsighted. Generally speaking, it was a good tradeoff: Now I don't wear glasses all the time, I only wear them for reading.

But who takes reading glasses into the shower? And without them, how do you tell the small, non-descript hotel shampoo from the equally small, equally non-descript hotel conditioner? I got as close as I could without putting an eye out, but the blur was so bad the writing on the bottles might as well have been hieroglyphics.

Which made me wonder: Do some people have similar experiences with food labels? Do they display too much information in type too small to read? The ingredients-list type on many products is so teeny-weeny it defies reading glasses or bifocals; only a magnifying glass is up to the task.

For two sizeable groups of Americans -- those with eagle eyes and those who don't read labels -- none of this matters. For the rest of us, the Food and Drug Administration's new labeling rules (http://tiny.cc/…) will make labels less readable in some ways and more readable in others.

WORSE: The rules require several new disclosures -- information about "added sugars," potassium and vitamin D. Some packages would also require, in addition to the information on calories and nutrients per serving, an additional column with the same information for the whole package. There are merits to these changes, but their effect will be to cram more verbiage on labels.

BETTER: On the other hand, the FDA's new rules require some information, like calories and serving sizes, to appear in larger type. And one bit of information -- calories from fat -- need no longer be included. That's because, the FDA says, "research shows the type of fat is more important than the amount."

Thanks to my encounter with unreadable shampoo bottles, I'm reconsidering the "traffic light" approach to label disclosures. I've been wary of traffic-light disclosures because some of them seem to offer frustratingly little information. The Whole Foods in my Washington, D.C., neighborhood, for example, labels fish red, yellow or green, but the explanatory legend gives several possible reasons why a green might not be warranted. Some of these reasons matter to me more than others, but the clerks behind the fish counter often don't know which applies.

There are, I now realize, more sophisticated traffic-light systems. One (http://tiny.cc/…) that's been proposed lines up six circles side-by-side in a rectangle. The far left circle discloses the calorie count. The other five render red, yellow or green verdicts on saturated fat, sugars, sodium, protein and fiber, with short verbal descriptions inside the circles.

That's progress. For many people much of the time, a yellow "Med Sodium" (medium sodium) or green "Low Sugars" will more than suffice to make better food choices. But the shopper with high blood pressure, for example, might find "medium sodium" too vague for safety. Why not give him both the traffic light and the details on the back of the package? Why not let him pull out his reading glasses and get the precise number of mgs of sodium?

As for me, I'll be patronizing those hotels that color code their shampoo bottles.

Urban Lehner

urbanity@hotmail.com

(CZ)

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