OTTAWA Some of the world's biggest food brands and leading organic labels have understated the amount of bad nutrients such as fat, sugar and sodium in their products, or overstated the good ones, internal government tests show.

Kraft, Frito Lay, Unilever and Heinz are among the big names with a product that flunked Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) testing, conducted to see if nutrition claims on labels live up to their billing.

Loblaw's popular President's Choice brand had multiple "unsatisfactory" tests on products ranging from cereal to spaghetti.

Premium brands like Amy's Kitchen, Eden Organic, Natur-a, Kashi and Yves Veggie Cuisine also fell short on composition claims, as did Canadian food-makers like B.C.-based Sun-Rype Products Ltd. and Quebec-based Aliments Fontaine Sante.

Test results involving these and other companies, conducted between 2006 and 2010, have just been released under Canada's access to information legislation. CFIA previously released overall statistics about compliance rates for some product categories, but the earlier release did not contain individual test results and did not name specific brands or products.

The level of detail provided in the newly released documents shows labelling problems are widespread.

But most companies told Postmedia News that, when CFIA flags a labelling problem, they move quickly to change the labels. Some major operators even beefed up their own internal controls to better monitor their nutrition claims.

CFIA allows for a variance of up 20 percentage points on nutrition information found on food packages to account for natural variances in ingredients or deviations in testing equipment. Anything beyond that is considered unsatisfactory.

Companies tagged with unsatisfactory results say they're committed to providing accurate information. But natural variances in ingredients, including crop fluctuations with organic produce, or changes in a product's nutritional composition over its shelf life, means this is not a perfect science, they say.

Some consumers wonder whether they can rely on the nutrition information on food labels, since CFIA can only test a tiny fraction of the tens of thousands of products on store shelves in any given year. It's unclear whether CFIA's limited testing program is representative of the entire market or masks an even bigger program.

Link:
Canadian nutrition label claims often wildly misleading, tests show