Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 4, 1994 TAG: 9405070005
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: B8 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Sandra Brown Kelly
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Set aside more time for grocery shopping, 'cause you're going to need it. In coming months, items on supermarket shelves will be more chock full of nutrition information than food to eat.
Sunday is the day the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 takes effect. After then, all food leaving the manufacturer must carry the new labels. Many companies have already made the shift, however, some as long as a year ago.
The adjacent illustration explains what certain label terms mean, but the label renaissance is more complicated than those definitions. It took years to develop the guidelines and many, many dollars to produce the new labels.
For example, Piedmont Labels Co. Inc. in Bedford, one of 15 or so major food-label printing companies in the country, has burned a lot of midnight oil and some of its profit redoing from scratch most of the designs of the 20,000 or so different labels it prints.
The new requirements turned the label-printing business upside down, said Denis Deane, vice president of human resources at Piedmont.
"The concept is wonderful," Deane said this week. But, oh woe, what it did to his business.
"It took 70 percent of our business back to stage one. It has hurt our profitability and sales," he said.
And it's not over.
Deane said it will be about three months before the label conversion is complete. The process has been tedious, because each food item affected had to be analyzed, the analysis translated into the label language, and then the labels redesigned.
The reason the process hits the label-printing business so hard is that those companies must wait until the second and third printings of labels to recoup preparation costs.
So, for many reasons, Deane and the Department of Health and Human Resources' Food and Drug Administration want shoppers to use the labels. But that's not going to be easy.
To come close to making use of the new data, shoppers need to know a few things about the law and the language involved in the new labels. Here's a very short course:
All packages must carry information on calories, total fat, sodium, total carbohydrates and protein. Small packages and foods that have less than half of the nutrients required on the standard label are allowed to use a short or abbreviated nutrition label; others take longer to read, because they include more information.
Get familiar with the term Daily Value so you can understand what it means when a food is labeled Dietary fiber 1g or 4% of Daily Value. That means one serving of the food contains 1 gram of dietary fiber, and you'll have to eat something else to get the 24 other grams of fiber you should consume per day.
Daily Value percent on the labels is based on a 2,000-calorie diet, which is not the diet for everyone. A Daily Value for each nutrient has to be calculated on caloric intake of an individual, keeping in mind that 20 grams of fiber and 46 grams of protein are the minimums recommended for all calorie levels below 2,000.
The American Dietetic Association says the best way to use the label is to scan it quickly for references such as "low fat" or "good source," then read more carefully to build a nutritional daily diet. A quick way to make changes in your diet is to keep the same food category but choose the version of that food that has less fat, saturated fat or sodium, for example.
If you want further instruction on reading food labels and making healthy choices, drop in on a workshop at the Salem YWCA on May 13 from noon-1 p.m. Virginia Tech extension agent Jean Vandergrift is conducting the free program.
by CNB