How many times have you devoured the entire box of mac and cheese (Come on, you tell yourself, it’s not that much), only to scan the label and realize you just consumed 2.5 servings of the stuff?
Foiled again by the food label! It’s tough to avoid, according to a new study commissioned by the FDA and published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics. In an effort to determine which design conveyed health information the most clearly, researchers redesigned food labels and tested them against standard ones. In one tweak, for instance, nutritional information was divvied into two columns when a package contained multiple servings: The first column indicated stats for a single serving, while the second offered nutritional details on the entire package. In another tweak, packages were only labeled with the latter info.
Researchers then assigned these labels to a bag of chips and a frozen meal—foods that would typically be consumed in one sitting, even though they’re listed as containing more than one serving—and tested them on a group of consumers. No surprise here: Participants were more likely to consider a food "healthy" if they only saw nutritional info on a single serving, which is what's currently on labels.