How the law decides a food is healthy

Most words that sound reassuring on a package are not regulated. “Natural” and “clean” are the familiar examples and they have a page of their own.

“Healthy” is the exception, and it goes further than people expect. It is defined in US law, the definition is precise, and it extends to the derivatives: the regulation names “health,” “healthful,” “healthfully,” “healthfulness,” “healthier,” “healthiest,” “healthily,” and “healthiness” alongside it. You cannot escape the test by reaching for a longer word.

What the test actually asks

Read the definition and the striking thing is what is missing from it.

A food qualifies by containing enough of something. The regulation starts from what it calls the foods “that are the foundation of a healthy dietary pattern” and lists them: vegetable, fruit, whole grains, fat-free or low-fat dairy, and lean meat, seafood, eggs, beans, peas, lentils, nuts or seeds.

Then it sets limits. A vegetable product has to carry at least a half-cup equivalent of vegetable, and stay at or under 10 percent of the daily value for sodium, 5 percent for saturated fat and 2 percent for added sugars. A grain product needs three quarters of an ounce equivalent of whole grain and gets a little more room on added sugars. Dairy, seafood, game meat and the rest each have their own row.

Numbers, thresholds, food groups. Nowhere in it is a list of ingredients that disqualify a food by their presence.

Two ways of judging the same packet

That absence is the whole point of this page, because it describes a way of thinking about food that runs opposite to almost everything written about ingredients online.

The regulator asks what a food contributes. Does it bring a serving of vegetables. How much sodium comes with it. What does eating this instead of something else do to a day.

Ingredient writing asks what a food contains. Is there an additive in it. Is there a number. Is there a word you cannot pronounce.

The second question feels more rigorous because it is concrete and you can answer it by reading the back of the packet. It is also the question that produces most of the anxiety in this subject, and it is not the question the people who write the rules are asking.

Take the four ingredients this page is filed against. Potassium sorbate stops mould. Soy lecithin keeps things from separating. Modified food starch thickens. Mono- and diglycerides holds fat and water together. Each one gets treated online as a mark against a product. None of them appears in the healthy test in any direction, because none of them tells you what the food contributes.

What happens when the vocabulary leaves the packet

Words like clean, natural, processed and healthy do not stay on labels. They become the vocabulary people use for meals, then for themselves, then for the people they cook for.

The internet has a name for the far end of that, “almond mom”, used for a parent whose food talk passes a fear of eating on to a child. We are not going to define it further than that, because it is internet shorthand with no clinical or legal standing and no source we would be willing to cite. We mention it because it is the point at which label vocabulary stops being about labels, and because pretending that point does not exist would be its own kind of dishonesty on a site that writes about food words for a living.

What we can say is the narrow thing we actually know. The reassuring words on a package are mostly unregulated, the frightening words in ingredient writing are mostly untethered from what regulators measure, and neither set was designed to be a rule for living.

What to do with this at the shelf

Treat “healthy” on the front as a real claim, because it is one and the manufacturer had to qualify for it. Treat “natural” and “clean” as decoration, because nobody had to meet anything to print them.

And when you turn the packet over, remember that the ingredient list is answering a different question from the one the front is answering. The list tells you what is in the food, which is exactly what you need when you are avoiding something specific, whether that is an allergen or an animal ingredient. It was never designed to rank foods against each other, and reading it as though it were is where a great deal of unnecessary worry begins.