WASHINGTON — Some of the nation’s largest food companies cut calories in their products by more than 6.4 trillion, according to a new study.
WASHINGTON — Some of the nation’s largest food companies cut calories in their products by more than 6.4 trillion, according to a new study.
The study — sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation — found between 2007 and 12 that the companies reduced their products’ calories by the equivalent of about 78 calories per person per day. The total is more than four times the amount those companies pledged to cut by next year.
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 about 2,000 calories. The study said the calories cut averaged out to 78 calories per day for the entire U.S. 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 1 trillion calories by 2012 and 1.5 trillion calories by 2015.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation signed on to keep the companies accountable, and that group hired researchers at the University of North Carolina 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.