If you haven’t already, you will soon see this label on processed foods at a grocery store near you. I know, I know… anyone who has been in a grocery store in the last three years, has probably seen the “smart spots”, “sensible solutions”, “best life”, and healthy food rating systems like “stars” or “overall nutrient quality index“. It’s complicated. What do these things mean and how can they help me? Right?!

The Smart Choices Program was motivated by the need for a single, trusted and reliable front-of-pack nutrition labeling program that U.S. food manufacturers and retailers could voluntarily adopt to help guide people in making food and beverage choices that fit within their daily calorie needs.

I have found in my private nutrition practice that people misunderstand sugar. Dietitians are most concerned with helping you limit “added sugars.” This is sugar that food manufacturers add to products to make them sweeter. The problem is that added sugars are not listed separate from naturally occurring sugars on the food label so you have to play detective and find the “sugar sources” on the ingredients list.

Watch my video on sugar in foods to help set the record straight on what you should look for.

Clearly no one signs up for an eating contest of any kind with the goal of minding their portion sizes. For participants in the Nathan’s Famous Hot Dog Eating Contest, an annual 4th of July event, the more you eat the better. Each year two men continually beat the rest of the contestants and battle it out for the infamous hot dog title.

We all know that whatever is in a hot dog is questionable, but do you think Joey Chestnut, of the U.S., and Takeu Kobayashi, of Japan, have ever stopped to read the food label on their pile of hot dogs? We think not. The folks at CalorieLab did the math and calculated exactly what the nutritional aftermath looks like when you eat 66 hot dogs on 66 buns (the total consumed by Chestnut in the 2007 event).

If trying to understand the nutritional value of the foods you’re eating based upon the information provided on food labels and ingredients list leaves you feeling lost, then help is here. Some of these are already in place and many are coming soon, but four different organizations have created new labeling for packaged and fresh food products to help consumers understand at a glance how healthy or not their foods really are. Whether printed on the package itself, like Smart Choices, or posting stickers on shelves, like NuVal, counting nutrition will be as easy as 1-2-3, or maybe even counting stars, like Guiding Stars. Here we explain these new systems, as well as Nutrition IQ, and how they each work for you.

SMART CHOICES

Smart Choices labels are being printed on the front of the package for only foods that nutritionally qualify. You’ll see the green check mark, servings per package and total calories per serving. The “rating” is defined by a co-op of food producers, retailers and nutritional organizations like the American Heart Association.

Some of the nation’s largest food and beverage companies are implementing a common nutritional standard and using a universal logo on packaging to denote healthier foods in our grocery aisles, which they are hoping will help consumers identify and purchase healthier foods. This logo and packaging are part of the Smart Choices Program, which is expected to hit our grocery stores the middle of next year.

This logo will appear on the front of the products’ packaging and will include the Smart Choices logo, a check mark, the calories per serving and number of servings in the package. The Smart Choices Program logo signifies foods that limit unhealthy ingredients and feature healthy ones.