In a previous post, I poked a little fun at the Nutrition Facts label on food items. Let’s face it, the incomprehensible arrangement of calories and percentages of daily allowances based on your daily caloric intake (without any guidance whatsoever as to what your daily caloric intake ought to be) make nutrition labeling much less useful and practical than it should be.

Well, someone over at the FDA must be reading Fifty-Something Women because they have just developed an online interactive game to teach consumers how to read the nutrition label. The program, called Make Your Calories Count, features a character called Labelman (I swear I am not making this up). Labelman will lead you through the murky waters of nutrition labeling, explaining portion sizes and servings per container.

Actually serving size and servings per container are the pivotal bits of information on any nutrition label and the manufacturers use them to their advantage quite well. No one wants to look at a bag of chips they are about to consume and read that it contains 1140 calories! So the manufacturer will put on the label that a one-ounce serving contains 190 calories. Well, that doesn’t sound too bad for a snack. It’s probably not bad. It gets bad when you eat the whole bag which is actually six one-ounce servings.

Make Your Calories Count looks slightly amateurish and a bit like one of those overhead projector slide show presentations at some pyramid scheme motivational meeting. There are a few beeps and pings as Labelman slaps his pointer at the label facts and then exits, stage left.

Go see our tax dollars at work at Make Your Calories Count