Nutritious Battle...till the hogs come home and land on the dinner plate

How can society ensure that the populace is educated and can exercise due diligence? Should the government put into place procedures to mitigate the lack of education of the public? The debate over food labels illustrates this dilemma.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQMJJAaY-3g

Report Suggests Food Label That Highlights Harmful Nutrients - NYTimes.com: "The report suggests a package-front label that would do essentially the opposite. It called for the label to emphasize the potentially harmful nutrients in the food product — for example, those that promote obesity, diabetes or heart disease — and exclude information on beneficial nutrients like fiber or vitamins. That was partly to avoid a mixed message and partly because including information on positive ingredients could encourage food companies to unnecessarily fortify foods with nutrients in order to score better in the labeling system, the report said.

“What we’re suggesting is that food products be labeled in a consistent way with information that will help the general public decrease their risk for chronic diseases and this is the type of information that is unlikely to currently appear on the front of the package, “ said Alice H. Lichtenstein, a professor of nutrition at Tufts University, who was vice chair of the institute committee that prepared the report." Marion Nestle, a nutrition professor at New York University, said that the nutrition information that companies currently provide on package fronts is intended to help sell products and so it emphasizes healthy nutrients that consumers want in their foods, like fiber or whole grains. For that reason, she said, the food industry is not likely to embrace a system that focuses only on nutrients that most people want to avoid.

“All of this is about food industry marketing,” she said. “If it weren’t about marketing all this stuff would go off the packages and we would go back to packages that just said what the products were.”"