Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics
ResearchOriginal ResearchNo Fat, No Sugar, No Salt . . . No Problem? Prevalence of “Low-Content” Nutrient Claims and Their Associations with the Nutritional Profile of Food and Beverage Purchases in the United States
Section snippets
Methods
This study uses a commercial dataset of household food purchases from the IRI (Information Resources, Inc) Consumer Network panel.14 This consists of data from households with children and adolescents aged 2 to 18 years and their household food purchases from 2008 to 2012.15 Participants use a handheld scanner to scan barcodes on all packaged foods and beverages purchased. Information gathered for each purchase includes volume, price, retailer, and date of purchase. For random-weight and loose
Overall Trends
There was no significant change in the proportion of purchases with any type of low/no-nutrient claim from 2008 to 2012 for foods or beverages (Figure 2). In 2012, 13% of food purchases had any low/no-nutrient claim, with low-fat being the most prevalent at 10%. Also in 2012, 35% of RTD beverages had a low/no-nutrient claim, with the most prevalent being low-fat (19%) as well, followed by low-calorie (9%) and low-sugar (8%).
Race/Ethnicity and SES
There were very few differences by race/ethnicity with regard to the
Trends/General
This study found that 13% of packaged food and 35% of packaged beverage purchases included low-content nutrient claims, and this proportion of purchases did not change significantly between 2008 and 2012. These are lower than previous studies’ estimates of the overall prevalence of nutrient claims in the US food supply5, 8 (53% in the most recent Food Label and Package Survey8), which could be because previous estimates included both low- and high-content nutrient claims (eg, “high-fiber,”
Conclusions
Low-content nutrient claims are a common feature among US household food and beverage purchases and are more common among RTD beverages than packaged foods. However, low-content nutrient claims are not necessarily reliable indicators of a product’s nutritional quality. When examined collectively, packaged food and beverage purchases with any low/no-content claim had lower mean energy, total sugar, total fat, and sodium densities relative to purchases with no such claim, but substantial
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Terry Hartman, MPH, MS, CCRC, for his coordination and management of this project.
L. S. Taillie is a research assistant professor, Department of Nutrition, Gillings School of Global Public Health, and a Fellow at the Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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2021, AppetiteCitation Excerpt :Nutrient content (NC) claims, such as “high in fiber” or “low in fat,” are the most prevalent health-related strategies on food packages (Colby et al., 2010; Kaur et al., 2016; Mayhew et al., 2016; Taillie et al., 2017) and in food advertising (Choi et al., 2013; Nan et al., 2013). These claims are commonly used with foods high in sugar, fats, and sodium (Choi et al., 2013; Colby et al., 2010; Lapierre et al., 2017; Taillie et al., 2017; Yoon et al., 2009), which are associated with numerous health risks (World Health Organization, 2003). The pervasive use of NC claims on products high in sugar, fats, and sodium is concerning because people tend to generalize from the one positive attribute in the NC claim to the whole product, leading to beliefs that the product is healthy, regardless of its total nutritional content (Choi et al., 2013; Hall et al., 2020; Schuldt et al., 2012).
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L. S. Taillie is a research assistant professor, Department of Nutrition, Gillings School of Global Public Health, and a Fellow at the Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
S. W. Ng is an associate research professor, Department of Nutrition, Gillings School of Global Public Health, and a Fellow at the Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Y. Xue is a senior data scientist, Duke-UNC USDA Center for Behavioral Economics and Healthy Food Choice Research, Duke University, Durham.
E. Busey is a research assistant, Carolina Population Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
M. Harding is an associate professor of Economics and Statistics, University of California, Irvine.
Supplementary materials: Tables 1 and 2 and Figures 5 and 6 are available at www.jandonline.org. Podcast available at www.jandonline.org/content/podcast
STATEMENT OF POTENTIAL CONFLICT OF INTEREST No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.
FUNDING/SUPPORT This work was supported by a grant from Healthy Eating Research, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, and by the Carolina Population Center (CPC P2C HD050924). Data for this study were provided by the Duke-UNC USDA Center for Behavioral Economics and Healthy Food Choice Research through third party agreements with the US Department of Agriculture and IRI (Information Resources, Inc). Any opinions, findings, recommendations, or conclusions are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Economic Research Service, US Department of Agriculture. The analysis, findings, and conclusions expressed in this paper also should not be attributed to IRI. This research was conducted in collaboration with US Department of Agriculture under a third-party agreement with IRI.