These days, many food packages make a promise of nutrition: reduced fat, high fiber, whole grain, or non-GMO, to name a few. At first glance, these claims seem designed to help shoppers choose healthier options at the grocery store. But new Cornell research suggests they are a less reliable guide for better nutrition than many people assume.
In a new analysis published in Nature Food, Cornell food marketing researchers Pei Zhou, Miguel Gómez, and Harry Kaiser examined nearly 150,000 packaged food and beverage products launched in the United States between 2015 and 2024. Yuqing Zheng, an agricultural economist at the University of Kentucky, also contributed to the study.
4 Types of Food Package Claims
The research team grouped printed claims into four categories:
- Minus: promises reduced levels of nutrients we should limit, such as lower sodium
- Plus: promises added or increased beneficial nutrients, such as more fiber
- Natural: indicates the food's production characteristics or ingredient origins are organic, non-GMO, or have no artificial additives
- Functional: emphasizes physiological or health benefits, such as immune support.
To judge the overall nutrition of the product, the team used the U.K. Nutrient Profiling Model, a scoring system developed in Britain to regulate food marketing. Unlike a single-nutrient claim, the system weighs a product's entire profile: calories, sugar, sodium, saturated fat, fiber, protein, and fruit, vegetable, and nut content.
The researchers found more than half of new products included claims on their packages. Yet, about two-thirds of these products were classified as "less healthy" overall, according to the British nutrition model.
Products with some types of on-package claims tended to have slightly better overall nutrition than similar products without those claims, but this pattern was not consistent across all claim categories. Even when products with claims scored better, many were still considered less healthy overall. A claim highlighting one positive feature could also come with less favorable levels of other nutrients. For example, beverages claiming "low/no/reduced sodium" and "low/no/reduced saturated fat" had higher amounts of sugar. In dairy and eggs, as well as in meals and side dishes, "low/no/reduced trans fat" claims were associated with lower protein and higher saturated fat and sodium levels.
Even when a claim did match up with a better overall nutrition score, many of those products still landed in the "less healthy" category of the nutrient profiling system.
“Natural” Claims
"Natural" claims were the most common type, and it’s important to note that they do not necessarily convey information about nutrition quality, including levels of sugar, sodium, or fat, the study found. In the analysis, natural claims such as "no artificial flavors" or "no preservatives" were associated with poorer nutrition profiles in several food and beverage categories.
This is important because previous research shows that shoppers often read them as signs of healthfulness, a bias known as the halo effect.
The authors offer two explanations. First, food manufacturers could possibly make formulation trade-offs, where cutting one ingredient is offset by adding more of another. Second, food manufacturers may use selective signaling, in which a claim highlights one improvement while other nutritional qualities are not mentioned.
Shoppers pay attention to these claims, but they may not fully trust them. Those are the findings from a 2025 white paper published by the National Science Foundation. The paper found 83 percent of consumers report reading food labels before buying a product, and 78 percent said they prioritize health claims when doing so. But only 16 percent of survey participants considered such package nutrition claims as highly trustworthy, and 20 percent reported difficulty interpreting nutritional information.
The Cornell study does not suggest that companies are breaking the law. Nutritional claims are regulated for accuracy about the specific attribute they name, not for representing a product's entire nutritional profile. The authors also note the study’s limits: It is observational, covers newly launched products rather than what people actually buy, and did not measure how consumers respond to claims.
Diet Essential Reads
Nevertheless, federal regulators are rethinking food labels. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration updated its definition of "healthy" in 2024 and has proposed a new, front-of-package system that summarizes nutrition at a glance. Other countries have adopted different approaches to simplified front-of-package labeling, resembling similar systems in the United Kingdom, Mexico, and Chile
The take-home message: Claims on the front of food packages do not tell the full story. It’s important to check the back label for added sugars, sodium, and saturated fat. And when a label touts less of one thing, compare it with the regular version to see what the tradeoff was.