Making Food Labels Make Sense
Why Transparency Matters
It can be hard to make the best choices about what food to buy. Nutrition labels often list ingredients that are hard to pronounce, much less understand what they are doing in your food. Is that ingredient good for me? Does it help keep my food safe and tasting its best? Is it necessary? The labels are just too small to give you the answers you need.
Meanwhile, the advice you get from the diet and nutrition world can be so full of buzzwords that it’s hard to know what to think. What’s the difference between organic and all-natural? Is keto and gluten-free the same thing? Is a product with five ingredients automatically better for me than a product with seven ingredients?
There are certainly benefits to eating whole foods, but telling people to avoid a product because its ingredient list is long or because it contains unfamiliar or technical names is just too simplistic.
For one thing, natural ingredients often have scientific names on nutritional labels: Cyanocobalamin is vitamin B12. Ascorbic acid is vitamin C. So just because an ingredient is hard to pronounce, doesn’t mean it is bad for you.
And when ingredients are added to food products, it is in many cases for a very specific purpose: to keep them fresh, enhance their nutritional value, or prevent spoilage and waste, for example. So a product with a long ingredient list isn’t automatically less healthy than one with a shorter ingredient list. In fact, it may be just the opposite.
There could also be ingredients in our food that are not nutritionally necessary. Sometimes companies add ingredients to change the look or consistency of their products, but those ingredients do not add to the nutritional benefits of the products. We want to empower the consumers to understand the purpose of each ingredient and make informed purchases.
Consumers deserve a way to cut through the buzzwords and chemistry garble and get to the facts from a source that isn’t trying to tell you what to do or sell you something. This will empower consumer choice and support brands that are honest about their ingredients and why they use them.
How It Works
Honest About IngredientsTM is a database of thousands of ingredients used to prepare and produce food in the United States, paired with common-sense descriptions based on FDA standards and definitions.
The Honest About IngredientsTM tool is a plugin for participating brands and products that you can use on any web browser. Hover your cursor over any food ingredient on a participating website, and the tool will bring up information about that ingredient in language that is easy to understand, along with additional information from FDA sources for those who want to learn more.
Who We Are
Honest About IngredientsTM is a mission-driven project of the Transparency Initiative, LLC, an independent collective of scientists, technologists, and consumer packaged goods experts. We are committed to being a trustworthy source of impartial, evidence-based information. We don’t take funding from any brands, corporations, institutes, or any other group that would create a conflict of interest.
The Transparency Initiative, LLC’s Mission is dedicated to empowering consumers and creating a more transparent food industry by making unbiased, scientific information about ingredients and food packaging clear and accessible to all. We believe that consumers can make informed choices about their nutrition if they are given the right information.
Learn More
To learn more about Honest About IngredientsTM or the Transparency Initiative, LLC, feel free to contact us here.