Instructional &
Informational Posts
Speaking in Tongues (SiT) will not improve your Spanish or Mandarin. (It won’t make them worse either.) Instead, SiT helps us become fluent in the language of health and wellness, scrutinizing the zoo of text on labels around us. Can "bio" be added to anything? How do I pronounce that additive (and why is it there)? We're looking closely and critically at commonly-used words and phrases, with a concern for the consumer and a delight in language itself.
Common sense tells us that the nutritional needs of various bodies differ, related with age, size, activity levels, propensity to chocolaholism, and so on. A professional sumo wrestler needs more calories than a newborn. Easy as pie with different-sized slices, right?
So when the “Nutrition Facts/Valuer nutritive” decal on all your food products proclaims that these here are the % Daily Value (DV) of fat, sodium, iron, and beyond, who are they talking about? Whose day? Whose intake?
The DV is synonymous with what’s called the “Reference Standards” for macronutrients like fat and cholesterol (top-half of the decal), and the “Recommended Daily Intake” (RDIs) for vitamins and minerals (bottom half of the decal).
The order of information, and the info that must be included, is regulated. Listing some nutritional information is mandatory, some is voluntary, and some is only mandatory when a health claim is made related to that nutrient. Example: If a label claims high in omega-3 fatty acids, the details must appear in the nutrition facts table even though polyunsaturated fats normally aren’t mandatory to display.
The basis for the DV is a 2000-calories-a-day diet with %30 of the calories from fats (or 65 grams), which suits a large swath of us generically.
Here’s a sample of info that is mandatory and some that is optional within the nutrition facts table:
You’ll notice vitamins and minerals only have %DV, not exact values for how many units are contained. Compared to the Reference Standards (fats, fibre, etc) where some items only have a total measurement (like protein in grams or energy in calories), and some are required to list both units and %DV (like fibre and fat). According to Health Canada, this is because the units and values for vitamins and minerals are so finicky that as consumers we’ll be thrown for a loop**: 110 mg of sodium is only five percent of our DV whereas 2 mg of iron is fifteen percent.
For some items like sugar there exist little recognized guidelines on adequate daily intake. Curious gaps aside, you’ll find a shocking degree of honesty in other ways, like the requirement to state %DV even when it’s over %100.
Dietary recommendations were first developed in the States in 1941, with Canada following suit a year later. Nutrient-based reference values came about in the ‘90s, spearheaded by the Food and Nutrition Board of the Institute of Medicine (National Academy of Sciences, USA), with whom Health Canada decided to collaborate and harmonize Canadian numbers.
Both orgs offer more specific reference tables online, broken down by sex, age, and pregnancy, since ultimately the recommendations won’t be all-encompassing.
Whether you are lactating, an Ironwoman triathlete, iron anemic, a sumo professional, the Nutrition Facts table may be best used to compare products and as a general benchmark.
The rest should be taken with a grain of sodium.
** Apparently the labelling wizards are prepared to unleash a numeric onslaught for most of the nutrition facts but suddenly distrust our readership when reaching vitamin C (we’re probably reading it when we have the fuzzy brain of a cold).
--
Emily Glazer likes to babysit other people’s cats and to drum on any surface that'll answer with a sound. She advocates for women’s health through research and writing (so far) and her soul delights in jazz. Delight in a moment with Emily here.
