Imported goods in Singapore come with a label that shows who imported the product, their address, where the product is from and other miscellaneous information. After living here for so long I’d gotten used to seeing them, but one day I was looking at my jar of Peter Pan peanut butter and I wondered why they had covered up the nutritional information with another label that also shows nutritional information. It seemed kind of pointless, so I slowly peeled back the sticker to see what was underneath.
Oddly enough, the importer relabeled the product with incorrect nutritional information. In the photo above you can see that the importer label doesn’t show the potassium at all, and it also incorrectly shows how much of the daily percentage of recommended niacin the product contains. It rates it at 20%, instead of 15%.
It isn’t just the peanut butter labels that were changed. There were other food items I checked where the value of how much of a certain substance in the food was changed. For example, I think one reported there being a lesser amount of iron in the product than the original label indicated. Do the importers open the products and extract the iron? I doubt it.
These are both based on a 2,000 calorie daily intake, so what’s the reason? Do Singaporeans, as multiracial as the country is, need less niacin than other human beings?
Bradley Farless 