Could be worse. It was once common to go “lite” by cutting the serving size… because the diet-conscious would only drink half or so of a can, right?
And probably is worse, in that they are certainly adding something to boost the flavor, and it’s probably not 100% Pure Goodness. Compare the labels and ingredients VERY carefully and you’ll spot it. (Care to post the exact product names so I can look up the labels online?)
V8 is, of course, whopping in sodium… I remember looking at the standard-sized cans when they came out and it was something like 1300 or 1600 mG per can. (And the low-sodium stuff tastes awful.) A produce best enjoyed as originally marketed, in a tiny can and occasionally.
One of the huge downsides of the nutrition “black box” getting more rigorous over the years is that the FDA et al. have all but conceded enforcement of the rest of the label. In an era of continually shrinking budgets and personnel (did you know that chicken inspectors are about to be reduced by half - I almost wrote “cut in half” there, but…) they can focus on something like honesty and completeness in the black box and not much else.
Hence the proliferation of complete BS in the art portion of the labels - because the producers can primly point to the black box and assure us they don’t think consumers are stupid. (cough Nutella cough)
Cover the black box and rely on the label to tell you what’s inside, especially with the large jars stocked right next to the peanut butter. Especially with the pretty little green sprig in the label design and most of the copy framing it.
Then read the nutrition label.
Nutella is 40%+ sugar, 40%+ palm oil, <13% ground dried hazelnuts and a smidgen of “cocoa and skim milk.” It’s worse than most chocolate frosting in a can - candy in a bottle, which is how it’s sold and presented in Europe, as a tidbit taste treat. Here, it’s been positioned, literally and in its label content, as an alternative to PB, and sold in kilo jars. With a label identifying it as “a hazelnut spread with cocoa and skim milk.” (Which it is not, in Europe; nothing much about the European labels presents it as anything but spreadable candy.)
(PB, by the way, has to be 95% ground peanuts to qualify for the name. So even brands considered to be “loaded with sugar” have less, by weight, than most processed foods on the shelf.)
It’s about like packaging and promoting Snickers bars as “a peanut food” with every stylistic and innuendo you can cram in to imply it’s a great healthy alternative.
That article tries to give the impression that the “artificial flavor” is some lab experiment. it’s not. It’s essentially concentrated orange zest, extracts, and oils, which come from… oranges.
Or Chun King itself. It was developed by Jeno Paulucci, the same guy who sold Jeno’s Pizza Rolls. Paulucci added various seasonings used in Italian cooking to the Chun King recipe.
Well, the canonical example of a product that implies that it’s foreign and exotic is Haagen Dazs ice cream (umlaut omitted). Which was made in the exotic Bronx, NY.
I do my mother’s grocery shopping along with my own. Since her doctors have put her on a sodium restricted diet I’ve become very aware of the nutritional labels and especially aware of the portion sizes. I may look at something and see a relatively low sodium content until I realize that it’s per teaspoon or some other ridiculously small serving size.
I often see things labeled “lower sodium”. Lower than what? Usually lower than the standard version of the product, which oftens contains an ungodly amount of sodium. So the “lower sodium” version contains 1/2 an ungodly amount of sodium which is still way more than she should have.
These companies are deliberately trying to mislead people about the quantity of an ingredient that could be dangerous to people with heart disease. Yes, it’s possible to determine the truth by carefully reading the label, but they deliberately make is as difficult as they legally can. That’s low.
I grew up near Princeton, New Jersey. A lot of businesses in my town were called “Princeton” this or that. Years ago, Princeton’s mayor suggested making them pay a fee for doing so. Our town pointed out that we were actually older than Princeton. As far as I knew, nothing came of the suggested fee.
This is one of those “While you may think that, technically, this answer applies, it’s still frowned upon to post due to the potential to cause religious hijacks/debates”.
If you’re really looking for just a religious debate (of any kind), you’re probably better off just starting your own thread.
Which isn’t actually “artificial flavor” at all. Flavor additives derived from the actual things they taste like are “natural flavors.”
ETA: Although, in the case of the from-concentrate brands mentioned, it looks like the flavor additives fall within the labeling standard of “orange juice concentrate,” so they aren’t broken out as “added flavors” of any description.
Yeah, that one doesn’t really bug me so much; I wouldn’t be surprised if the companies have managed to extract the flavor compounds as part of the deaeration process, and turn around and just put them back in more consistent proportions to get the flavor profile they want.
It’s kind of analogous to old German beer using special malt-based colorants and hop extracts to stay within the letter of the Reinheitsgebot; technically, the beer was nothing but water, yeast, malt and hops, but in reality, they were tweaking the color and flavor after the fact so that say… that bottled Oktoberfest was always that same orange-brown shade and equally bitter from batch to batch and year to year.
Not really, it pretty much means what it says. Lower sodium is not the same thing as low sodium. There are separate designations for low and salt-free products. I can’t see how this is an attempt to deliberately mislead anyone. All in all, I’ve been pretty disappointed in the examples of sketchy marketing in this thread.
If it says 100% orange juice, what’s inside is 100% from oranges. That juice is extracted, held at near-freezing temps, blended to produce an even taste and then punched up with fresh zest and oils from a later batch is as irrelevant as noting that “aging” meat means, precisely, hanging it in a cold locker to let it slowly rot into a tender state.
