The Latest in Food Label Tricky Tactics

Many seemingly healthy foods, such as granola, veggie chips, protein shakes, yogurt, sports drinks and trail mix, aren’t as healthy as many might think. Food labels can trick consumers into thinking they’re choosing a nutritious, wholesome product when it’s actually loaded with sugar, sodium, fat, preservatives and other questionable ingredients. Moreover, the rules can change suddenly, further complicating things. It takes a savvy shopper to see through the hype and gimmicks.

Food manufacturers can cleverly use psychology and even make deceptive claims to make us think their products are healthier than the competition. Package design details, misleading language, serving size tricks and hidden sugars are all tactics companies use to convince us a product is healthier than it really is. So it's important to learn how to look beyond the packaging to see what’s really in the food we're purchasing. Here's how to protect yourself and those you love from these tactics.

Psychology in Marketing

Marketing works hard to elicit a positive emotional response, and seeing through this effort requires getting into the psyche of a company’s target market. Successful marketers use a great deal of psychology to form an emotional connection with their audience, make their competition seem less appealing. They want to build brand loyalty and ramp up our fear of missing out.

Of course, they really want to sell more products. If they can convince us that their product is higher quality, healthier, more environmentally responsible, tastier, more wholesome or superior to competing products, they can increase their market share. And given this goal, their whole job is designed to accomplish this while staying inside the letter of the law if not the spirit. In other words, manipulation may be okay, or even encouraged as being clever.

Healthy-Looking Packaging

In an effort to sell more, food manufacturers use psychological tricks when designing their packaging. Most of the time, the tactics they employ are subtle: muted colors, natural imagery, thin containers, see-through film and eco-friendly packaging. Let’s take a closer look. Here are some packaging tricks to watch out for and why they work:

• Container Shape - Thin containers with a curvy shape make consumers feel like the product is lower in calories.
• Imagery - Natural imagery, such as farms, grains and produce, make people feel like a product is all-natural or organic. It may also make us feel like it contains whole grains—even if it doesn’t.
• Muted Colors - Muted packaging colors may make products appear healthier. Doesn't the color green signify something is healthy? Not necessarily.
• Brown Paper - Eco-friendly appearing packaging makes people believe a company is environmentally conscious and uses recycled materials—even if they don't.
• Transparent Film - Being able to see the actual product makes consumers believe that the food inside is of higher quality, fresher and healthier.

It may help to remember that the company may be using certain colors, shapes and imagery to influence a certain decision. It’s necessary to look beyond the packaging to figure out if the product is healthy or not. These decisions cannot be made based on appearances.

Misleading Language

The language used on a food package can often be misleading. This is why it’s important to know how to read between the lines. Some of the most common claims food companies use to convince you their products are “healthy” include:

• Fat-free - A product labeled as fat-free may seem healthy, but to make up for the taste that fat brings, it may also contain extra sodium or sugar instead.
• No added sugar - This may seem like the product is sugar-free, but it doesn't mean that at all. It means there is no extra sugar. Unhealthy sugar substitutes may have been used.
• Zero Trans Fat - Surprisingly, a product can actually have up to 0.5 grams per serving and still qualify for this statement.
• Low-Calorie - This only means that the product has fewer calories than a similar product offered by the same brand. Other brands might have fewer calories. This can also indicate such a small serving size that it's "low-calorie" to eat a portion that no average person would consider a serving.
• Natural - The product does not have to be all-natural to make this claim. It just has to include a natural component, such as an apple.
• Made with Whole Grains - Products containing little whole grain content can make this claim. It doesn’t mean that it only contains whole grains — just some.

Approach packaging claims with a healthy dose of skepticism, and do not make a decision based solely on packaging language because it's too tricky to know what they're referencing. Instead, pay attention to what’s on the label. That is, even though it may be time-consuming, read the nutrition guidelines.

Avoiding Food Label Tricks

If we can’t trust packaging, what should we pay attention to? The answer is the food label, also called the nutrition label. If we want to insulate ourselves from these practices, we have to read the entire food label from the top to bottom and compare it with the labels of similar products. It helps to mentally weigh the ingredients, serving size, calories, total fat, cholesterol, carbohydrates, sugar and protein against one another. For the most part, we'd want to choose the product that is lower in fat, carbs and sugar and higher in protein.

However, food labels are not above trickery even here. For example, a product may seem low in calories, sugar and carbs than other products when it actually isn't. How? The serving size may be smaller. If a package label for one type of cookie reads better than a comparable product, it means nothing if the serving size of the former is one cookie and the latter is four cookies. So, be sure to pay attention to the serving size. Are you really going to eat just one cookie? We have to practice self-honesty even if the labels make it easy to lie to ourselves.

Hidden sugars are also a common problem. Some names that companies use to hide sugar in their products include high-fructose corn syrup, carob syrup, agave nectar, brown rice syrup, barley malt, lactose, dextran, fructose, galactose, disaccharides and maltose. When looking for sugar content, pay particular attention to the total grams of sugar included (as compared to the serving size) and less attention to the list of ingredients to determine if it is low or high in sugar. Even if the product boasts that it contains “natural” sugar, remember that sugar is sugar.

Of course, whole foods purchased in the produce department is where we should do the bulk of our shopping. There is no need for a label on that apple. But if we add in any packaged foods, we should know that we're walking into territory where we may be deceived. Food labels can be tricky to decode but with practice, we can all learn to look past the package design and hype words to see what’s really in our food—and in some cases, whether it should be considered food at all.

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