14 DAY TRIAL // In a new scientific study, researchers show that inscription of the packages of food, that describe the amounts of carbohydrates these products contain, are misleading to customers.
Companies producing these foods generally tend to advertise health benefits by employing claims such as that their products contain low amounts of carbohydrates.
This is used to let people know that the things they are about to buy are healthier than related items, but that is rarely the case. Low amounts of carbohydrates do not equal healthier foods, experts say.
The way people look at these products made the object of a new scientific investigation, which is published in the September/October issue of the esteemed Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.
When Nutrition Facts panels were absent, “low-carbohydrate claims led to more favorable perceptions about products' helpfulness for weight management, healthfulness, and caloric content,” experts write in the journal entry.
“Because an individual packaged food product's usefulness for weight management as part of an overall diet, its healthfulness, and total calorie content are not dependent solely on the amount of total carbohydrate it contains,” the researchers add.
“The study demonstrated that consumers could misattribute benefits to products that claim to be low in carbohydrate,” the team adds, quoted by e! Science News.
The experts say that such studies are enormously important, given the fact that the popularity of low-carbohydrate foods have increased considerably between 2001 and 2005.
After a number of authors and dietitians published books showing that low-carbohydrate diets are healthier, sales of products boasting to contain low amounts of the stuff increased by 516 percent.
“Participants' perceptions became more consistent with the nutrition profile of the products,” when Nutrition Panels were present on the tables, the researchers add in the paper.
“By showing the claims and the NF [nutrition facts] side-by-side, both pieces of information were equally accessible to participants as they answered the study questions. The presence of the NF, however, allowed participants to use this more diagnostic information to judge the product,” they add.
The bottom line of the investigation is that consumers need to be better educated as to the real health benefits of the products they are purchasing.
Front-of-package claims are not always what they seem, and they rarely have the health effects everyone believes they do.