Comments on: Food Nutrition Labels are Not Accurate

By: Chad Upton

Chad Upton — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 12:11:58 +0000

Doug, I appreciate your comment and you’re bang on… the number of foods tested is not large enough to accurately represent all of the food that is imported, but it is all we have to go on.

I will look over the data again since it is my intention to be as accurate as possible and I don’t believe I misrepresented the facts or implied that 44% of all imports were tested. I did state the number of samples that were taken, “anywhere from 85 to 181 domestic and 53 to 188 imported products were tested in a given year.”

In fact, the main argument of this post is that we don’t do enough testing which can be deadly to people with allergies and there is little incentive for the manufacturers to comply.

The point of the article was not to attack any one country, but rather to raise the awareness that labels are more inaccurate than people may be aware of.

Thanks for reading.
Chad

By: Doug

Doug — Sun, 11 Apr 2010 21:40:53 +0000

I read the GAO report and your article misrepresents what was stated in the report. 44% of imports from Mexico and Thailand weren’t found to be in violation. Eight out of the 18 products *tested* from Thailand were in violation. Out of all the food products imported only 18 were tested. That’s a far cry from 44% of ALL imports as your article implies. For Mexico, the sample size was 200 and there were 87 violations. Every single product was not tested. These were just samples and any statistician will tell that 18 is not a big enough pool for a valid sample. Your article is full of generalizations and misrepresented facts. Please be concise and accurate when writing for the public

By: Bad Fats Can be Hidden on Nutrition Labels « Broken Secrets

Bad Fats Can be Hidden on Nutrition Labels « Broken Secrets — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 06:14:14 +0000

[...] mentioned in an earlier post that nutritional labels are not accurate, but in some cases the FDA actually requires them to be inaccurate. That might sound strange, but [...]