It's a confusing world when labels like "healthy", "organic" and "sugar-free" might provide more questions than answers. By Polly ParentingPatch, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons Last year in Mr. Rui's Grade 8 English class, we were asked to write an advocacy speech on any chosen social issue. I wrote a speech about the alarming effects of mislabeling. I didn't plan to write about this issue; in fact, I intended to write about how corrupt ocean fisheries are. After carrying out some research, however, I quickly became very interested in and shocked by the issues around food labelling and even had many real life situations to relate it to. Below is the speech I wrote and delivered, which I hope will be thought-provoking for you and help you make the choices you want to make when you next go food and drink shopping. Baby food. Any parent would buy it. It can be cheap and in any supermarket here the prices start at only around 60 meticais. According to the labels, products like children's yoghurts are made with tons of natural fruit and are covered with health approving stickers on the cute little plastic pots. How good will this make parents feel, providing such nutritious food for their children yet not spending large amounts of money? Doesn't that sound like such a great deal? 60 meticais for something so healthy. Too good to be true? Actually, yes. I looked into the small print on some of these products and it revealed unimaginable amounts of sugar and unhealthy ingredients that shouldn't be fed to babies. I bet you didn't expect that and I don't blame you. Who would do this? Unfortunately, thousands of companies mislabel their products just like this. The other day I was grocery shopping with my mom and when she saw a yoghurt with apparently real vanilla beans she thought she had to buy it and try it out. Fortunate.y, I stopped her in time and read the back of the item to really make sure the logo wasn't misleading her as I was learning that this happens often, where "sugar free" children's drinks, for example, might contain up to 50% of fruit sugars. An example aside from the baby food is one of the most commonly mislabeled products: seafood. One meta-study in 2021 revealed that 44% of seafood was mislabelled. Photo by Russell Miranda on Unsplash Another of the commonly mislabeled products that we know about are everyday eggs. Were you aware that "free-range" hens are not necessarily mean "cage-free"? In other words, that free-range hens can often spend much of their time locked up, though cage-free rates are increasing. This proves just how effective words can be; how much words matter. Consumers can be persuaded to buy a product just by using the right vocabulary, though often these words are really just words and not reality. Unfortunately, all of this isn't the only problem. False labeling isn't only incredibly unethical but can and will also negatively affect our health. In 2018, "companies spent $21 million dollars advertising dangerously unhealthy and sweetened drinks across all media in the U.S as healthy", even though decades of research "confirms that drinking too many sugary drinks can raise the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, type 2 diabetes, tooth decay, numerous allergic reactions and on and on." This makes it a real struggle for us to learn the truth, when research and facts are so different to what we see on the product labels. Advertising these drinks appears to increase companies' profits, but it doesn't improve our health, our children's health or our future as a global society. This can't be what we, the consumers truly want, but only what companies want in order to take advantage of our ignorance and profit from it. Take Coke Zero as an example, a soda that all of us have surely at least heard of. Coke Zero is supposedly a “healthier” version of Coca-Cola, and therefore more popular amongst some customers. Truth be told, however, research tells us that yes, coke zero does have less sugar but at the cost of having so many more sweeteners, which makes the "healthier" version potentially just as bad or even worse. So is the difference in sugar really worth the extra chemicals entering our bodies? Well, that's often the health market for you; selling an item as healthy or healthier when most of the time it isn't. Photo by Marcus Dietachmair on Unsplash The name Coke Zero is perfect for the product but not because it contains zero sugar, but rather because it contains zero nutritional value and has zero positive health effects. Those Infrequent times when the health food market promotes actually healthy items, it markets them as trendy, exclusive foods like chia seeds, quinoa and many more. Labels overhype all of these organic products and in response they sell exceptionally well and at inflated prices. The important question here is why? Why do thousands of companies do this when they know what it's doing to us? The health food market has a value of 936.7 Billion USD. 936.7 Billion. No wonder profit-seeking companies do this, despite knowing that it's slowly killing us and our environment. Our home. It's hard to believe but after all of this comes another horrifying effect of mislabeling. As I said before, fish is commonly mislabeled; not just the types of fish and where they come from but how they are caught. Companies make million dollar profits from selling small barely noticeable badges quoting "dolphin safe". This takes me to our oceans. As you probably know, most tuna is caught with gigantic fishing nets catching fish but also large numbers of dolphins, turtles and even sharks. This issue has led many people to quit their consumption of fish, so companies have come up with the idea of selling their products as “bycatch free” fish. That sounds fair. Eat fish, but save the ocean.As the documentary Seaspiracy highlights, these labels cannot always be trusted and bycatch is an inevitable result of these fishing methods. Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash So we have to stop. But what exactly can we do? What we can do is make a change. What we can do is educate ourselves. What we can do is inform others. Some countries have already started the process of change. The South African government, for example, has recently banned all food items with trendy labels such as “smart-food”, “wholesome” or “nutritious”. Instead of relying on slogans, approving stickers or simply the name of the product, we have to read the back of the label properly. I know this may sound annoying and time consuming and may be a lot to ask for, but reading each item carefully will make a huge difference to the quality of our diets, with only a small sacrifice.
Another easy way to avoid getting trapped by misleading labels is not relying on aesthetic and trendy designs. Aesthetically pleasing packaging is often a strategy companies use to attract consumers. So my message is: don't judge a product on its design; don't judge a product by its label; judge what you consume by researched facts, which will drastically improve not only your life, but the life of your children and the life of our planet.
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