Added Sugars: Nutrition Facts Manuscript

“Added Sugars” on the Nutrition Facts Panel

Tools and strategies needed to be created to help control chronic diseases and promote health to consumers. The NFP was originated from the 1990 Nutrition Labeling and Education Act. The NFP requires prominent display on most packaged goods, and its regulation by the US Food and Administration (Laquatra, Sollid, Edge, Pelzel, and Turner, 2015). Many consumers in the United States of America needs to be educated on how to read the NFP. The NFP is a tool that provides the consumer nutritional information of the items that they purchase. The Dietary Guidelines for American advises that sugar intake should be reduced. The 2015 Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee notes that sugar intake has reduce, however,

The survey was 30 minutes long and it assessed the consumer’s perception, interpretation, and personal use of the NFP and nutrition information.

The quantitative phase surveyed 1,088 consumers. They selected the consumers from a national respondent panel that have more than 2 million members. The consumers selected were 18 years of age and older and they were screened to be reflective of the US population with respect to census region, sex, age, race, and Hispanic national origin (Laquatra et al., 2015). This phase were given questions and they had to select the answer that applied to them.

Both phases were given the current NFP and the proposed NFP (see Appendix A for image). The Current NFP does not include “Added Sugars” and is labeled as Version S. The first proposed NFP has “Added Sugars” indented under “Sugars” and it is labeled as Version S+A. The second proposed NFP has “Added Sugars” indented under “Total Sugars” and it is labeled as Version

54.8% of consumers identified the amount of total sugars after viewing Version S+A first and 66.3% after viewing Version TS+A first. Many consumers were confused about the information that was listed on the NFP. Even the consumer that indicated that they knew how to read the NFP had difficulties. 44.9% NFP readers that first reviewed the Version S+A answered incorrectly, while the 33.4% of NFP readers that reviewed the Version TS+A first answered incorrectly (see Table 1 for results). Consumers had to determine if the “Added Sugars” were included in the grams of sugars or an addition to the amount of sugars. In the survey the words “included” and “in addition to” were underlined. After the survey was evaluated it shows that 54.4% of consumer answered correctly; the added sugar was included in the