Buyer Beware: You HAVE To Read Labels

HFI: Research your foods and learn to read labels. Healthy doesn’t necessarily mean free of harmful ingredients.

Food labeled “healthy” should be nutritious, low in added sugar, and free of trans fat and other harmful ingredients, right? Not according to the Food and Drug Administration’s current labeling guidelines.

The rules for health claims on food products hasn’t been significantly updated since 1994, despite big advances in nutrition science.

EWG Food Scores database has nutrition facts, ingredients and processing ratings on more than 80,000 products, and our Dietary Guidelines can help you create a healthy and nutritious diet for yourself and your family.

It’s clear the FDA needs to modernize its criteria for “healthy.” When we look for “healthy” foods in a grocery store, we are looking for foods that nourish our bodies and are not known to have harmful effects.

By Dawn Undurraga, Nutritionist and Violet Batcha, Digital Media Manager

This article originally appeared at: http://www.ewg.org/enviroblog/2017/05/buyer-beware-what-s-really-healthy-cereal.