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In Great Britain, some researchers have proposed an idea to have new health labels that are exercise labels put on those cheat foods that we sometimes over indulge.
Would you still eat that candy bar if you saw a label on it that said that you needed to 42 minutes of walking or 22 minutes running?
We’ve all seen the studies and the news that obesity and overweight diseases are on the rise and mostly in the children…we’re talking about diabetes, heart disease and cancer too.
Shirley Cramer, chief executive of the Royal Society for Public Healthy says, “People find symbols much easier to understand than numerical information, and activity equivalent calorie labels are easy to understand, particularly for lower socioeconomic groups who often lack nutritional knowledge and heath literacy.
For example, the calories in a can fizzy drink take a person of average age and weight about 26 minutes to walk off.”
They’re saying that the FDA is in the process of working on a rule that is going to require the nutritional labels to tell us more than how many grams of sugar are in something, but they want to add something to tell us what we should be intaking in a day.
Would you do this? Take the recommendations of how much sugar/carbs to intake in a day?
Well, Shirley Cramer is also saying that the pictures showing people how much walking or running they could do to work off whatever you just ate or drank would be less pushy. It’s not like telling you DO THIS NOW, it’s comes across nicer to the consumer. She said, “The public is used to being told to avoid particular drinks and to cut down on specific foods. By contrast, activity labeling encourages people to start something, rather than calling for them to stop.”
Not every researcher is for it… a senior scientist at Tufts University, Susan Roberts’ opinion about the concept a “ridiculous idea.”
She continues with saying, “The problem with weight control is that exercise isn’t always the solution. Exercise makes people hungry, so it makes people eat more. The focus should be on eating healthier foods that keep you full longer.”
And more people weigh in… a man named Bust David Just studies psychology and economics drives human behavior at Cornell University say more…
Just says, “The labels that we have currently tend to tell us things like number of calories and grams of fat and things like that – it’s stuff that is very hard for the average consumer to really understand and make use of it.”
He also said stuff that some of us just never took into consideration, he said,”It only takes something like a 50 calorie difference in a day over the course of a year to add up to several pounds. So if we make small changes daily, we can end up having a cumulative effect bit it makes a long time.”
What do you think? Would this new label actually work for you?
Via:today.com
