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A new analysis of nearly 150,000 food and beverage products launched in the United States over the past decade found that products bearing health-related claims are not consistently healthier and are sometimes less nutritious. Reducing one unhealthy ingredient sometimes means adding more of another.

The analysis was led by Miguel Gomez, a professor of food marketing at Cornell University, and Pei Zhou, a postdoctoral researcher in his lab. The study drew on a decade of new-product data from the market research firm Mintel.

"One day I went to a supermarket, and I noticed there was original flavor and lower-fat cream cheese," she said. "They had reduced the fat, but they had more total sugars and more sodium. There are so many label claims on packages. Our main question was whether products with claims are healthier than those without health claims."

The Cornell team applied the Nutrient Profiling Model, a scoring system developed by the U.K. Food Standards Agency. Unlike a single-nutrient claim, it weighs a product's full nutritional makeup at once, penalizing excess sugar, sodium, saturated fat and calories while rewarding fiber, protein, and fruit and vegetable content.

Applying that lens to the American marketplace, the researchers found that two-thirds of the newly launched products they analyzed qualified as less healthy overall, even though half had on-package health claims.

The trouble, the researchers found, often comes down to trade-offs hidden in the fine print of formulation.

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