- Sure, from an industry perspective, an added sugar by any single, identifiable name might not sell as sweet, but that's for Big Sugar to swallow — not the American populous.
There was a preponderance of wordplay in this article. Incidentally, anyone who argues against this label change is a criminal who should be held at least partially complicit in the numerous deaths from obesity-related health problems.
In principle, I am for this change. (I don't like the removal of calories from fat, but that is another matter.) In practice, it's (worse than, arguably) useless. Because: How do you define added sugar? Is adding concentrated grape juice, for example, considered "added sugar"? Dehydrated apples? Sorghum syrup? Corn syrup? High-fructose corn syrup? No matter how you define added sugar you'll both end up pushing people away from "good" products, and not pushing them away from many of the products that this is intended to push people away from. The large businesses have the money and the reasons to try to find alternatives that are not classified as added sugar. They'd find alternatives that are essentially equivalent but are not classified as such. Whereas smaller businesses will not be able to. Speaking in generalities here, but that is what I'll predict will happen if/when this change goes through.
This is a perfect example for the idea that everything shouldn't be a for profit business. How can you seriously be lobbying to protect making shit food? How shit of a human are you to even be producing this stuff? Why would you pursue scaling to a size that this would even be necessary? Its insane to me. Maybe I'm just naive.
This seems like a great change. Why not add the percentage of recommended daily value too? Even if they set the RDV at 12 tsp/day, seeing a nutritional label saying "This has 80% of your RDV intake of sugar!" is a obvious reminder that what you're eating isn't exactly healthy.
I'm all for this change, it seems like an addition that just makes sense. It's hard to argue against the fact that many foods have substantial amounts of sugar added to them during processing. Now, what I would like even more than this would be a serving size system that makes sense.
No such thing as sugar that is "good for you". There is sugar that gets absorbed into your body quicker than other sugars, thereby creating faster spikes in your blood sugar, but that's about it. There are also foods such as veggies and fruits that have other things in them that make it so the sugar is absorbed even slower, and they are things that, typically speaking, you shouldn't avoid even if they have sugar in them. But there is no such thing as sugar that is "good for you".
Wasn't Michelle Obama working on an overhaul of the serving size system? Hold on a sec Here you go. Actually, looks like it was maybe supposed to be part of this overhaul. So we'll see if that ever happens.