title: Improving the design of nutrition labels to promote healthier food choices and reasonable portion sizes.
abstract: Accurate and easy-to-understand nutrition labeling is a worthy public health goal that should be considered an important strategy among many to address obesity and poor diet. Updating the Nutrition Facts Panel on packaged foods, developing a uniform front-of-package labeling system and providing consumers with nutrition information on restaurant menus offer important opportunities to educate people about food's nutritional content, increase awareness of reasonable portion sizes and motivate consumers to make healthier choices. The aims of this paper were to identify and discuss: (1) current concerns with nutrition label communication strategies; (2) opportunities to improve the communication of nutrition information via food labels, with a specific focus on serving size information; and (3) important future areas of research on nutrition labeling as a tool to improve diet. We suggest that research on nutrition labeling should focus on ways to improve food labels' ability to capture consumer attention, reduce label complexity and convey numeric nutrition information in simpler and more meaningful ways, such as through interpretive food labels, the addition of simple text, reduced use of percentages and easy-to-understand presentation of serving size information.
authors.affiliation: Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences, Harvard School of Public Health, Cambridge, MA, USA.
authors.forename: C A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Roberto
authors.affiliation: Department of Nutrition, Harvard School of Public Health, Boston, MA, USA.
authors.forename: N
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Khandpur
mesh_terms: D002755:Choice Behavior; D003258:Consumer Behavior; D019649:Food Industry / Q000191:economics / Q000592:standards; D005515:Food Labeling / Q000191:economics / Q000592:standards; D005518:Food Preferences / Q000523:psychology*; D015438:Health Behavior; D007722:Health Knowledge, Attitudes, Practice; D006801:Humans; D018673:Nutrition Policy; D009765:Obesity / Q000517:prevention & control*; D064787:Portion Size / Q000523:psychology*; D011634:Public Health