An Urban's Rural View

Consider a hypothetical box of crackers. The nutrition label says it contains eight servings of 17 crackers each. It says, further, that a serving equals 140 calories. If you ate the whole box, how many calories would you be consuming?

Put aside the obvious question: Why would anyone eat the whole box? Think instead of something like potato chips or popcorn. No matter how many "servings" the manufacturer says they contain, some people devour the whole package.

Two Food and Drug Administration researchers surveyed 9,493 Americans (http://tiny.cc/…), testing them on different labels. The researchers concluded Americans would be better at assessing and comparing the healthfulness of multiple products if the label disclosed the total number of calories in products.

In other words, don't make Americans multiply eight times 140. Some can't. Others are too lazy.

The theory is that labels requiring no mental arithmetic would enable shoppers to compare two boxes of crackers or chips and pick the less caloric one. In practice, though, it might not be so simple. For example, one box might contain eight ounces and 1,075 calories while another had 8.5 ounces and 1,120 calories. Horrors. Now we have to do division.

Recognizing the dangers of information overload, some nutrition experts think bewildered consumers might be better off with much simpler labels. Many advocate replacing or supplementing the label's nutritional detail with a red-yellow-green system, with green signifying healthful and red the opposite.

But calculating the colors for simple labels would be anything but simple. Should genetically engineered ingredients count as a negative? Should the working conditions of those producing the food enter into the equation?

Those are just two of the many issues that would have to be debated. In the current FDA reconsideration of label requirements, color-coded labels are a long shot. They may always be.

And, of course, many consumers pay no attention to labels anyway. The FDA researchers admitted people might not eat more healthfully if they knew how many calories were in the whole package.

But at least they would have fewer math problems to solve in the grocery store. Which is a good thing, because as a country we don't seem to excel at math.

In the latest of a string of studies reaching similar conclusions, fourth- and eighth-grade students in the U.S. lagged counterparts in Asia and Europe in math and science (http://tiny.cc/…). Countries with educational systems as varied as Singapore and South Korea, on the one hand, and Finland, on the other, outperformed us.

In the long run, which will cost the U.S. more? The massive health-care costs imposed by obesity? Or our economy's inevitable loss of competitive edge as Americans fall further and further behind in math and science? Now there's a weighty math problem for some hungry PhD economist or mathematician.

Urban Lehner can be reached at urbanity@hotmail.com

(ES)

© Copyright 2013 DTN/The Progressive Farmer. All rights reserved.