The calorie information on food packages is wrong!
The calorie information on food packages is wrong!
Why don't food labels tell you the whole story?
Of course, unfortunately, this natural way is no longer the best way for today's well-fed and inactive people. If we want to lose weight, we have to challenge our natural urges. We should reject fluffy white bread in favour of coarse whole wheat; Reject processed cheeses in favor of natural ones; Reject cooked vegetables in favor of raw ones. And if food labels could tell us how many fewer calories we could eat by eating less processed foods, losing weight would be much easier. So why are nutritionists so silent on the subject?
For decades, various expert committees and associations have called for changes in calorie counting, but to no avail. Because researchers have found it difficult to calculate precisely how many extra calories we consume when we eat more processed foods. Instead, they found that it was very easy to calculate the exact number of calories a food would get if it were fully digested.
Therefore, when making food labels, it is necessary to choose one of the two methods, which is not perfect. The first method gives precise calorie numbers, but doesn't take into account the known effects of food processing, so it doesn't measure how many calories our bodies actually get from food. The second method takes into account the effects of food processing, but does not provide any precise figures.
Faced with this dilemma, every country has chosen to ignore the effects of processing, resulting in consumer confusion. The numbers given on food labels are likely to overestimate the number of calories the body can get from unprocessed foods. Food labels don't take into account the cost of the digestion process -- that is, the energy lost by bacteria and the energy expended during digestion. Both costs are lower for processed foods, so labels on processed foods are less likely to overestimate calories.
Is it time to make a change?
Since accurate calorie counting is important, it's time to reopen the debate. A "traffic light" approach should be adopted on food labels to tell consumers whether the food is highly processed (red), lightly processed (green), or intermediate (yellow).
It is a public health imperative that consumers understand how the way we process our food affects our weight. Counting calories is very important, and we cannot tolerate a labeling method that is clearly not the best. More scientific effort is needed to calculate how much food processing affects the number of calories available.
