Natural Food Labels: Misleading or Not?

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1:00Taste the forbidden fruit of knowledge. The last show with David Cooper. Natural, healthy. If you see those labels on the food you buy, you think it would sound wholesome, earthy, like it was made by some smiling farmer instead of a food company's marketing department. But surprise, a new study suggests those feel good food labels might be a little deceptive and not mean what you think they do. I am joined by economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, Kristoff Bounder, who's done research in this area. Kristoff, welcome to the show. Well, thank you for having me, David. So when I walk through the grocery store and I see labels on food like all natural, non-GMO, it feels like I'm being handed a sort of shortcut to say this food is good for me. It's nutritious. I do wonder though, is this just a trick that food companies marketing departments are playing on this? How much truth is there to these labels and how nutritious is the food that is labeled this way?

2:00I wouldn't want to use the term trick because I wouldn't want to suggest that firms are being deliberately deceptive. What happens is food companies are putting on natural claims and they are saying it's specifically, they are saying this product has been produced without artificial ingredients or some version of that. Now the problem comes in that many people, like you just mentioned, consider that this natural product should be more nutritious than others. And that's not necessarily the case. That's exactly what we're looking at in this study and we're comparing a content of special nutrients like sodium, saturated fat, like protein. And we don't really find significant differences between products with a natural claim and without a natural claim. So looking under the hood here, foods that are labeled natural, not necessarily being more nutritious than regular food or the conventional versions, were you surprised by this? As a consumer naively, I would think that it is more nutritious.

3:03Well, exactly. I think exactly a kind of problem that we don't want to be worried in a way that surprised by it is research that we've seen before that discusses something they turn the health halo of natural products. So a health halo means exactly what I mentioned, that we're looking at a label that tells us one thing, but we are attributing to it other positive characteristics. In this case, that we think the product is more nutritious than it is. And that's exactly what we're finding here as well, that these claims just do not say that the product is more nutritious than other products. This label natural, I was reading about something the other day. It's called chemophobia and I know that sounds like a fancy word, but it just means this irrational fear of anything that we perceive to be a chemical, which doesn't really make sense when you think about it. All food is chemicals, all compounds in every food organic or not are chemicals. Could that be something that marketers are playing into? This idea that like, oh, our food doesn't have chemicals, without a clear definition of

4:03what chemicals are and what that means? Yes, I certainly think that can be part of why we see these claims. And what's important here is that look, if you want to avoid chemicals, however you find those, that's perfectly fine. And the claims do give you some information about them. Now, most of these natural claims are not regulated, the exception of the ones we look at is the USDA organic label that is well regulated. So it can sometimes be a little bit sketchy as to what exactly that means. The definitions aren't necessarily clear when someone says all natural. But yes, that's absolutely the kind of direction that food companies go with these ideas. That's why they put them onto their packages. So you looked at categories involving, I don't know, yogurt, ice cream, bread, nut spreads, other things like this. Were there any examples where a food that was labeled natural was actually less nutritious than a conventional one? Well, yes. We have seen those. We haven't seen it systematically enough though that I would really want to say that natural

5:06foods are worse for you than others. But we have seen, for instance, that natural breads contain less fiber than products that are not labeled natural in our sample. Again, it's not systematically enough in our analysis that I would say that's necessary, something that I expect to hold everywhere. Now, I know that added sugar isn't necessarily great for you in a food, but the alternatives, like non-sugar sweeteners, you could potentially label something as healthier and then put things like aspartame or stevia in it. So in an attempt to label things as more nutritious, they could actually be less nutritious. Is this something they can crop up? Exactly. Like we mentioned, added sugar is problematic. That's when it's really bad for our health. And therefore, there are labels that try to direct us toward the healthy options. One of them is the FDA Healthier label that may have seen on your products. And they take added sugar into account.

6:06If you have more added sugar, it's harder to qualify for the label. The problem that comes with that is that, yes, if you want to keep your products sweet, how do you do that? You use sugar substitutes, something like aspartame, something like stevia. And these products, we don't really know how good or bad they are for your health. That's really where the issue comes in. There's some research that links sugar substitutes to severe health conditions, cardiovascular disease, for instance. This isn't established enough and isn't clear enough that we know for sure yet, that's the problem. But there's enough that the WHO actually issued a warning a couple of years ago and said, well, you probably shouldn't use these products. It's a conditional warning, exactly because the science isn't entirely there yet. But from our perspective, what we are wondering about is that, look, if we have doubts about sugar substitutes, do we want to set incentives to bring them into our foods? That's interesting. The incentive there.

7:06It's sort of like a food marketer is trying to game the label system rather than focusing on actual nutrition in order to get that healthy stamp they're putting in non sugar sweeteners, which may or may not be good for you, but looks like there's that warning. That's kind of odd incentives for how we label our food, isn't it? Yes. So the incentives play a huge role here. From the policy makers perspective, we need to think about, of course, what's worse? Is it the added sugar? Is it a sugar substitute? And there's research, certainly, for both appointing to them being negative for our health. So a better option if we can find polyester support that would be to just move away from products that are overly sweet and try to get to what products that maybe use neither or at least less of sugar substitutes or of added sugar. Now there is a regulated food labeling system and that's the nutrition labels on most foods, which can sometimes be at odds with some of the healthy claims like natural, all natural, this. These two systems, do they end up confusing customers when they're not quite in alignment?

8:10For example, if the nutrition label says it's loaded with fat, but the packaging says, oh, it's all natural and healthy and organic and all this kind of stuff, does this just confuse consumers more? That's a great question. And we haven't specifically looked at whether the interaction of those two different kinds of labels and claims are confused as consumers. But what is established is that yes, consumers do get confused sometimes by the natural claims. That's the health halo that I mentioned before. And also the healthy labels, they provide a great shortcut to getting to what a healthier product in general terms. If you're trying to avoid soldering, if you're trying to avoid adding sugar, you want to get fibres, they can really steer you toward that. But it also can steer you toward products that use sugar substitutes. For anyone listening who doesn't have like a PhD in nutrition or economics, is there a simple way to avoid being fooled by these labels in the wild? Is there any trick that you would want to consumer to know?

9:12I don't think there's really a great trick. But I really want to listen to take away from this is to know what the labels tell them and what they don't tell them. And the healthy label doesn't tell them that there's no non-neutrified no sugar substitute in it. The natural claim does not tell them anything about nutrition. So if you're interested in that, look, if you think about sugar substitutes, go back to ingredients. Look at the ingredients list. It's there. I understand it takes some time, but the information is there and you can work it out. If you're interested in nutrition facts, that's there. They list how much sodium there is. They list how much protein there is in the product. Kristoff Bounder is an economist and professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Kristoff, thank you for joining me. I've enjoyed the chat. Thank you so much for having me, David. It was fun.

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