Ben'Ova And Do Look Back: The Secrets of Nutrition labels

Don’t Judge A Book By Its Cover, Turn It Over And Judge It By Its Nutrition Label.

You know it’s there. Like the proverbial elephant in the room, you know that there is something you are intentionally avoiding everytime you buy a chocolate bar or a pack of potato chips. It’s there in black and white and it has always been there. And yet you have never given it the time of day. Why? Everything you could ever want to know is there.

So maybe you just don’t want to know?

There are two types of information that we see on any kind of packaged food product purchased at most supermarkets and stores. We can split these two types of information into two camps; "Fun Information" and "Not So Fun Information".

"Fun Information" is big, bold and beautiful. Written in the most captivating fonts, promising all the latest buzzwords. ‘Good source of protein’, ‘High in Fibre’, 'Lowers Cholesterol', the list goes on. Even though we may not know exactly what a food high in protein may mean for us specifically, we have spent enough time on TikTok and social media to know that protein = good, high protein = better.

And thus this product that we are buying, it must be good right? That’s the beauty of fun information. It does not challenge us. It makes things very very VERY easy for us. This good. You eat? You good.

"Not So Fun Information" is structured, constant and by definition boring. No fancy colors, no insane fonts. Nutrition labels are uniform and have been uniform for some time. But we find no comfort in their familiarity. In fact, despite their ubiquity, there are strangers to the vast majority of us.

Nutrition labels have flashed across our eyes more times than a transport board bus, yet if you had to test the average Bajan on what information was contained inside of a nutrition label they would not be able to tell you.

And if they could tell you what was there, they most certainly would not be able to tell you what that information entailed. That’s the not so fun part about not so fun information.

What is it even supoose to mean?

22g of added sugar? 2g of dietary fibre? What am I supposed to do with this information?

"Not So Fun Information" does not try to sell you anything. It is not an advertisement or an endorsement. It simply is. Almost like a weather report. The weather report will only inform you that the rain will fall. For the woman who works from home, it means she can snuggle up and be serenaded by the gentle pit patter of a light rainstorm. To the secondary student it means racing across the school yard avoiding the dirty wetness of their school, not to mention the excessive traffic that will plague the roads on their way home.

Not so fun information is just facts. Interpretation is up to you.

But you cannot interpret something that you know nothing about. How much sugar is too much sugar? What even is added sugar and how is it different from regular sugar? How much protein is a decent amount of protein? How much fat is too much? Is there such a thing as too much fat in food?

It is strange that despite the burgeoning unversality of education we have never had a class on how to interpret the information on a nutrition label. I remember as primary school students we had a blind taste test for different soda drinks in our Integrated Science class. But never had any time to learn how to read what exactly was in those soft drinks.

Knowledge is power and ignornace is bliss. Would you still consume a whole tube of tea time biscuits if you knew that the total added sugars of that snack was the equivalent of several donuts.

Or are you happy not knowing everything about the snacks and the food that you consume?

The vast majority of people fall into the latter. Despite not reading nutrition labels, a part of each of us knows that the chocolate bar packed with processed sugar is not good for us in the short or long run. But we simply..... just don’t care.

No. It isn’t that we don’t care. It is that it feels so hard to care. Yes, snacks are bad. But they taste good. If I wanted to make my own chococlate bar with less sugar it would take me significantly more time (presumably) and would not taste half as good (presumably). Most people just want to eat and call it a day.

And this preference for convenience is its own prison.

A cocaine addict knows that cocaine has ruined and will continue to ruin their life. But the easier choice before them is not to go to rehab. It is not to put mechanisms in place to ensure they never take cocaine again. Rather, it is to ignore the damages of their drug of choice and continue to consume it until there is nothing left. Of either the drug or them.

How different then are we to the consciously blind cocaine addict. Nutrition labels are not written in Japanese. And if they were, we still would not need them to discern a food as not good for us. Perhaps it is all too much for us to think about. So we’ll put it to the back of our heads, we’ll keep the nutrition labels at the back of our “foods” where no one would dare to find them.

And we will place our long term health on the back burner. We’ll get back to it when the choice to be healthy is more convenient and more fun.