How to read the new nutrition label

This is the final week of programming at Lakeside, and the director of education uses our own Lakeside "experts" who present fine programming. Yesterday was Wendy Stuhldreher a retired professor of nutrition and public health explaining the new labeling for food (she used a one page FDA graphic issued Jan. 2018 which I've been unable to find). My take away was, "just eat your vegetables." She said it many times, especially at Q & A. Her point was that although vegetables may not be high in protein or calcium, they perform with other nutrients as an orchestra, and all play their part.

She also stressed that vegetarians must find compensatory nutrition because they don't eat red meat. The audience was definitely in the osteoporosis/bone loss age group, so she also stressed calcium, but added that it was an investment we needed to make when we were young because the body starts making withdrawals from the bank of our bones by middle age. For a cheese good for protein and calcium, she recommended cottage cheese.

My mother's generation started that 2% and 1% milk trend (she was 5'1" and always watched her weight), and now my generation is probably low on the calcium reserves that needed the fat content for our bones. I think I continued with the 1% and skim until a few years ago.  Don't give young children skim milk as a replacement for whole.

When I first decided to attend Wendy’s lecture, I thought I knew how to read a label, but there have been significant changes, and we found out why, like Vit. D is now listed, but Vit. A & C have been removed because deficiencies in those are rare. Sugar is sugar on the new label. Fat is fat, and "calories from fat" has been removed. Potassium need has been added. (You can't get enough by eating a banana, which most of the audience believed).

The public health concern about sun damage and advertising about sunscreen has been so successful, we now don't get enough Vit. D and today's children don't play outside as much as the boomers and Gen-Xers. She gave the new thinking on sodium/salt--because more of us are eating out, we're not eating as many vegetables--and it's not the sodium, it's the lack of vegetables.  One woman (very thin) in the audience commented about addiction to sugar, and Wendy said that has not been proven and commented on the difficulty of using control groups for nutrition studies.  But one she did recall concluded sugar was less harmful than other sweeteners.

I know how we all love to read those organic and health food websites, but when doing an initial search, I add USDA or FDA to check the research, aka bibliography/footnotes.