Vitamin Water and Label Reading
I found this great article on the importance of reading beyond the marketing hype on the front of a label. Today’s very popular vitamin water drinks are often hyped as healthy alternatives to sugary sodas and juices. Their labeling points to vitamin contents and antioxidant benefits.
Truth in Marketing?
When the bottle is flipped over, however, the truth of the marketing is revealed. Very little real fruit is involved. High calorie counts from sugar with little real benefit and vitamin C which we as nurses know is a water soluable vitamin that is rapidly excreted when excess amount are ingested. Antioxidants have not been proven to have any health benefit in double blind studies despite correlational evidence.
The long and the short of this is that label reading is an important skill for all consumers and a point for health education by nurses and health care workers involved in diet and nutrition. Teaching our patients be good consumers may provide more long term health benefits than many of the other interventions we make.
Nutrition Education Long Term
Does your facility or staff offer any kind of nutrition program, either for employees or the public? If not, maybe you are the person to organize one. Education is one of the foundations of nursing care and this type of health education can have many long term and wide spread effects.
- Teach a parent or grandparent about effective label reading and you pass that knowledge on to their children.
- Help parents find healthy and fun alternatives to the low cost and low health benefit foods that are marketed to children.
- Work with a dietician to assemble a menu of healthy after-school snack recipes safe for kids to make on their own.
- Make it fun, make it repeatable, and test and follow up on effectiveness. You might create a program that can be implemented anywhere and everywhere!
Tell us what you are doing or about programs in your community and share with the Nursing Show audience using the comments link below.
Filed under nursing education, pediatrics for nurses by on Jan 22nd, 2009. Comment. 
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Comments on Vitamin Water and Label Reading
We used to buy these drinks in a bulk. Not the vitamin water one but the Snapple kind. Mainly because we would get them very cheap.
We also found that this was the only kind our daughter would drink without being juice.
Then we read the labels in detail and noticed that we were not doing any benefit to ourselves and daughter an we were helping to fill the landfills with tons of plastic bottles.
I sent an email to Snapple to suggest they changed to a glass bottle since what they attempt to portray is healthy things and using plastic was not any helpful for our earth.
They a standard corporate letter stating they take all suggestions seriously (I suppose so long as it doesn’t affect their bottom line).
Not only is the marketing of these bottled water mischievous, it is a damaging product for the environment.
I think a Coke can at this point in comparison might be even less harmful… if not for our bodies at least for our environment since Aluminum is highly recyclable and plastic is not so much.
Plus Coke is so much more tasty