Food labels, health claims and more at the Fooducate blog

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Have you written up your wish list for the new Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret Hamburg, yet? The Fooducate blog has posted its own nine wishes June 1, available right here. One thing Fooducate wants to see banned: Health claims on food packages, ‘which are actually marketing claims,’ it writes. (It has another blog entry that traces the history of food-labeling from 1862 to 2009. It prefaces the timeline with this interesting fact -- that ‘In 13th century, the king of England proclaimed the first food regulatory law, the Assize of Bread, which prohibited bakers from mixing ground peas and beans into bread dough.’

Fooducate’s June 2 blog entry takes a look at how accurate nutrition labels are -- and embeds an eye-opening video from diet.com in which various foods are weighed and assessed for their actual number of calories. The conclusion: You can easily consume several hundred more calories a day than you think if you rely on the facts on labels.

The FDA allows a 20% margin of error in nutrition facts on food labels, and most of the discrepancies fall into this margin.

Every so often, however, a food item exceeds the margin -- famously, the snack food Pirate’s Booty, which was found to have three times as much fat as advertised on its label: 8 grams of fat and 147 calories instead of 2.5 grams of fat and 128 calories. That led to a class action lawsuit. (The product was reformulated and the nutrition facts changed.)

-- Rosie Mestel