Food is usually seen as healthy or unhealthy and good for you or bad. Many companies promote this to their advantage in the style and content of their branding and packaging. Suggesting that their products are healthy, it may be more complicated than that.

Food producers claims of a product being ‘natural’, organic and ‘low fat’ lead the consumer to overestimate how healthy a food is and can also discourage the consumer from reading the nutritional value of the item. Oddly when individuals think they have consumed fewer calories than they have, their bodies respond as if they have consumed less.

Food Product Labelling and what it all means:

It’s easy to believe that ‘organic’ equals nutritious. But a food labels organic status does not guarantee the nutritional quality of food. The organic label only certifies the items production methods.

A low-fat product doesn’t guarantee that an item is healthy. In the UK this label means the product must have less than 3g of fat per 100g. When producers commonly take out the fat they pile in sugar. Similarly, many low sugar products contain greater amounts of fat and calories. Sugars can also be replaced with fruit sugars that are essentially the same as sugar but do not need to be displayed as sugars on the nutritional label.

Products labelled as ‘superfoods’ have no official regulatory approval. But it’s been shown to have a strong effect on consumer buying.

A ‘natural’ labelled product need only be derived from ingredients produced by nature. Many contain food chemicals renamed for the consumer to be more appealing but can be highly processed ingredients used for colouring.