Nutrition Labels

This article on the front page of the paper caught my eye this morning. It tells of a grocery store chain that

"developed a system called Guiding Stars that rated the nutritional value of nearly all the food and drinks at its stores from zero to three stars. Of the 27,000 products that were plugged into Hannaford’s formula, 77 percent received no stars, including many, if not most, of the processed foods that advertise themselves as good for you. These included V8 vegetable juice (too much sodium), Campbell’s Healthy Request Tomato soup (ditto), most Lean Cuisine and Healthy Choice frozen dinners (ditto) and nearly all yogurt with fruit (too much sugar). Whole milk? Too much fat — no stars. Predictably, most fruits and vegetables did earn three stars, as did things like salmon and Post Grape-Nuts cereal."

I would appreciate having that kind of system in place at my grocery store. I don't always look at all the different factors on the labels, until I'm home and start thinking about it. I noticed yesterday, after doing our weekly shopping that the beef broth has 99% fat free prominently displayed on the box. In smaller, much harder to read print underneath that, it says, "See side panel for sodium content." Hmm... what does that tell me? High sodium content maybe?

As I've written about here before, I've been giving some thought to transfats and sodium content in food, and even before reading today's NYT I was reaching the conclusion that home-made-from-scratch really is best, both taste-wise and nutritionally. It seems to be a dying skill though as many recipes call for a can of this and a package of that, and most of my acquaintances don't even cook that way on a daily basis, opting for prepared meals (or at least semi-prepared) instead.

I do believe that most things can be made from scratch with just a little added planning and preparation, but then I've been cooking mostly from scratch for years out of necessity while living in Japan. The quesion is, where does one draw the line? I'm not about to spend half a day making chicken or beef broth to freeze, especially when I don't have a deep freezer to put it in. I'm going to have to give this some more thought and pay more attention to the labels before I reach a conclusion on convenience vs health vs taste vs time management.

All I know now is that I can not trust the front packaging of most products - I must read labels and make informed decisions!