How to Read Food Labels

A lifetime of reading Douglas Adams has convinced me of the fundamental interconnectedness of things, and I don't necessarily mean it in some kind of spiritual, new-age sense. In my last post, I wrote about the tendency for modern-day collaboration technologies to drain us of System 2 (slow and analytical) thinking capacity. In our daily lives outside of work, we regularly exhaust this capacity when dealing with bad design. A poorly designed website or app, unclear instructions, or needlessly verbose and obfuscatory language are just some of the examples of how design has the ability to be memorable by being non-memorable. Great design is often invisible and it lets you get by with low-effort System 1 thinking because it does not violate your innate heuristics.

But this can be a double-edged sword. If your innate heuristics are underinformed, flawed or biased to begin with, then we end up with design anti-patterns that exploit that weakness. Food labels are a great example of this. We are wired to crave sugary, salty and fatty food, and unfortunately, nutrition science is notoriously complicated and forever evolving. Most people don't realize that scientists know more about how the brain functions than how nutrition and metabolism work. This has meant the rapid burgeoning of a misinformation universe that seeks to straddle the fine line between downright lying and hiding the truth.

I've collected some of the most egregious examples of misleading food labels and how you must actually interpret them.

Sugar is everywhere. Milk is sugar. Jaggery is sugar. Honey is sugar. Rice and Wheat ultimately become sugar in your body.

The right question to ask when you see "multigrain" is "multi-what-kind-of-grain-exactly". If it's low glycemic index grains like millets, then it's a useful label. Otherwise, it's like vegetable oils declaring themselves to be "cholesterol-free". Plant oils do not have cholesterol since it comes only from animal sources.

I know all of us want to save the planet, but apply some System 2 thinking to question some of these claims. "Natural" does not always imply "healthy" or "better for the planet". In fact, the word "Natural" has never had a single, consistent meaning over time. It's a marketing label meant to evoke your personal idea of what nature means, and no two people share the same definition.

Gluten-free is a relevant label only to the tiny percentage of the population that is allergic to it. Rice-based snacks are being sold as "gluten-free" so ????♂?

Glutamates exist naturally in a lot of foods - including tomatoes, parmesan cheese, seafood, meat and mushrooms. There is no evidence that a tiny amount of MSG will harm you, so at the very least, if you still want to avoid it, please be aware of other ways in which products will sneak in glutamates will using the word MSG.

Use jaggery or honey because it adds more flavour to your food. Using it for health reasons is pointless because it's really just sugar with a tiny amount of other minerals. By all means, replace sugar with jaggery but make sure you reduce your consumption of jaggery as well.

To be fair, I don't entirely blame companies for using clever verbiage to sell a product. These work because our brains tend to be susceptible to some rather common cognitive fallacies. What will change things is better public awareness and thus more informed customers. And hopefully, a better alignment between our System 1 gut feelings about food and food labels!

What are your favourite misleading food labels?