re: #176 Cannadian Club Akbar

If you don’t know basic nutrition you are an idiot.

Or, you’re the product of the combination of undereducation about food additives and oversaturation of vague language in descriptions of food.

I completely buy in to the argument that we’re all responsible for our food choices. I’m just unconvinced that real information about nutrition has been readily accessible until relatively recently. (Not talking about labeling requirements, although that’s part of it.) There’s been a great deal of slightly misplaced trust on the part of American food consumers — “well, the FDA says it’s OK, so that company CAN’T be putting out bad food”, and there’s no real understanding of the food production and distribution process. Further, I can’t recall ever being taught anything in school regarding reading and decoding nutritional labeling phrases, and never was taught the importance of being proactive in your food choices so you can occasionally indulge without it killing you.

I find it hard to criticize people for not being knowledgeable when that knowledge is obscured by those with an interest in maximizing profit. (An example: high fructose corn syrup — industry justification is that it’s OK “in moderation” — is a nutritionally useless, profit-maximizing alternative to using simple natural sugar. Fair enough, but take a look at how many products, from beverages to cereals to candy to baked snacks, use HFCS as a significant ingredient; for the average consumer, using HFCS “in moderation” is incredibly difficult because it’s everywhere.)

The recent trend toward requiring restaurants to disclose nutritional info should be a revelation to people. Up until recently, it was impossible for a diner to know that that caesar chicken salad they order as a healthy option has 2000 calories and the fat/sodium equivalent of a pound of bacon.

I put this in the same category as financial education in one critical sense: schools do not teach kids to take bankers’ and food producers’ words with a large grain of salt. Until we start raising young folks who are critical consumers, change will be very slow.