When grocery shopping, read the fine print

Herb Weisbaum • Profile • E-mail

This week, Herb tackles how food is labeled in grocery stores. Exactly how useful are the labels? Are they even a service to consumers?

My question deals with the chicken I find at the supermarket. Some brands have labels on them boasting that they are “hormone-free.” I thought all farmers were prohibited from giving their chickens hormones. Is that true? If so, this seems like a sneaky way for these companies to make their product appear superior to others when it’s not. It seems like someone needs to cry “fowl play” on this!
— Terry B., Woodinville, Wash.

You are absolutely right. USDA regulations prohibit poultry growers from giving hormones and steroids to their birds, so all chicken is hormone-free. This label, while truthful, is also potentially misleading. It’s like putting a “cholesterol-free” sticker on a banana — sounds good until you realize that all bananas are cholesterol-free.

“Don’t be fooled by this,” warns Urvashi Rangan, a senior scientist at Consumer Reports. This chicken “isn’t worth any more money than a poultry product that does not make this claim,” she says.

And get this: While hormones are prohibited, growers can still give their hormone-free chicken “antibiotics every single day,” Rangan says. These drugs, commonly used by farmers, serve the same purpose as hormones — to increase the growth rate.

A marketplace of misleading labels
This is just one example of how misleading labels are used to grab a shopper’s attention and move product. “It’s amazing what’s out there,” says Ilene Ringel Heller, a senior attorney with the Center for Science in the Public Interest. She believes this deception is deliberate, because it appeals to consumers “who want to buy something that’s good for them.”

For instance, "secret shoppers" for the consumer group are finding a variety of “whole wheat” products with very little whole wheat. If you want the benefits of whole wheat, look for a label that says “100 percent whole wheat.”

Juice drinks can be especially misleading. The product may not be all juice, and it may not be the juice you’d assume it to be. For example, Tropicana's Peach Papaya drink does not contain any peach or papaya juice. It’s mostly water, sweeteners and some pear juice. Last August  parent company PepsiCo settled a lawsuit by agreeing to call the product “Peach Papaya flavored juice drink.” It has also removed the claim “made with REAL fruit juice.” And yet the package still has pictures of peaches and papayas on it.

Remember, if a juice product is called a “beverage,” “drink” or “punch,” you can bet it is not 100 percent juice. It probably contains a large amount of water, sweeteners and white grape juice, which is cheap and not very nutritious. The only way to know for sure is to check the ingredient label.

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