Food industry cuts calories

WASHINGTON (AP):

Some of the nation's largest food companies have cut daily calorie counts by an average of 78 per person, a new study says, more than four times the amount the industry pledged to slash by next year.

The study sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foun-dation found that between 2007 and 2012, they estimated the total cut in food product calories to be about 6.4 trillion.

Seventy-eight calories would be about the same as an average cookie or a medium apple, and the federal government estimates an average daily diet at around 2,000 calories. The study said the calories cut averaged out to 78 calories per day for the entire United States population.

The 2010 pledge taken by 16 companies - including General Mills Inc, Campbell Soup Co, ConAgra Foods Inc, Kraft Foods Inc, Kellogg Co, Coca-Cola Co, PepsiCo Inc and Hershey Co - was to cut one trillion calories by 2012 and 1.5 trillion calories by 2015.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation signed on to hold the companies accountable, and that group hired researchers at the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill to painstakingly count the calories in almost every single packaged item in the grocery store. To do that, the UNC researchers used the store-based scanner data of hundreds of thousands of foods, commercial databases and nutrition facts panels to calculate exactly how many calories the companies were selling.

goals exceeded

The researchers aren't yet releasing the entire study, but they said yesterday that the companies have exceeded their own goals by a wide margin.

It is also unclear how the reduction in calories translates into consumers' diets. When the companies made the pledge in 2010, they said one way they would try and reduce calories would be to change portion sizes in an attempt to persuade consumers to eat less. The companies also said that they would develop new lower-calorie options and change existing products so they have fewer calories.