Food labels can be confusing for anyone. Registered Dietitian and Nutrition Educator, Amber Pankonin, breaks it all down for us.

Hi, I'm Amber Pink linen. I'm a registered dietician and personal chef. And today I'm here to talk to you about food labels and GMO foods. This is inside the pantry. So GMOs stands for genetically modified organism. And most folks think that GMOs are an ingredient when in fact they're a process. It's a process that is used by plant breeders that is helpful for improving a plant. What they'll do is they'll take a trait in one plant and transfer it to another in order to improve the plant at the end of the day. It gives the consumer very safe, affordable and healthy food. I think people are under the impression that there are a ton of GMO foods out there. And really there's only 10 approved GMO foods on the market today that includes corn, cotton, canola, soy, sugar, beets, alfalfa, some potatoes and some forms of apples. So one of my favorite GMO foods is the arctic apple. And this apple is non browning. So once you slice into it, you can leave it out for a few hours and it won't brown. It's amazing nutritionally they're identical, but you're probably going to not waste food or not waste those apples as much when you're buying the arctic apple. One of the first GMO products that came to market was the flavor saver tomato many years ago. However, that is not available today. So there are no GMO tomatoes on the market today. However, you're going to see this label, This non GMO label on this can of diced tomatoes next to this can that doesn't have the label and there's about 30 cents difference in these two cans. There's so many different food labels that are out there, even as a registered dietitian with a background in nutrition science. Food labels can be confusing to me, so I understand how it can be really confusing for the average consumer. So this is whole kernel corn and this has the non GMO label on it and then also has with natural sea salt one, the term natural could mean a lot of different things. There's no formal definition for the word natural, but also with sea salt. I think when folks see that they think maybe that's healthier. However, it still has the same amount of sodium compared to kosher salt or iodized salt. So there's really no nutritional value in looking for sea salt. There are some terms that are regulated. So for example, the term low sodium when it comes to the non GMO label, this is something that they can opt into. So it's not a requirement by any means they're paying for that label to be on. That can absence. Labelling is essentially a marketing strategy where brands are trying to communicate that this particular product is free of something and sometimes this can be a good thing in terms of maybe sodium or fat where consumers are looking to avoid those types of nutrients. However, when it comes to GMO foods, there's really no need to put that on a label. So here we have cranberry juice. Again, this has the non GMO label on it. There are no GMO cranberries on the market today. So again, this is just another example of the absence labelling. So utilizing GMOs is really just another tool in the toolbox for our farmers and producers. So we can use less water, we can use less pesticide and again it gives us better yield. So it's better for not only the environment, but it's also better for us as consumers. Mm