Carole Garner, senior policy analyst for the Arkansas Center for Health Improvement, is serious about getting Arkansans to read labels in pursuit of better health. So serious in fact, that when she noticed local vending machines in her own building weren’t in compliance with new labeling requirements she started looking for answers.

“I’ve contacted the vending company for our building two or three times,” she says. “I’ve seen their stocking staff a couple times and said, ‘Hey, when are you going to help us figure out what’s in there?’ ‘Oh, yeah,’ they say, ‘we’re going to do it.’ But they haven’t.”

The exercise has developed into a habit of whenever she goes somewhere, she’ll find the break room and check on the machines. More often than not, they also haven’t complied with the new rules that went into effect last December.

“We were over at the Capitol for a proclamation for Registered Dietician Day,” Garner remembers. “We were up there getting photos and I thought, ‘Oh, let me just see what’s happening up here.’ I went up to the third floor where they have their vending and there’s nothing labeled there.”

The irony of the story would be amusing were the premise not so serious. The National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases reports two out of three Americans are overweight to obese, with 33 percent falling in the latter category. Perhaps not surprising but no less tragic is the fact a full one-third of children ages 6 to 19 in the U.S. are overweight to obese.

Obesity costs American business an estimated $4.3 billion in absenteeism due to obesity-related health issues, a relative bargain compared to the $210 billion impact on the American healthcare system due to preventable chronic diseases brought on in part by excessive weight.

In Arkansas, 760,000 adults are obese and annual obesity-attributable expenditures total $1.25 billion,

40 percent of which comes from Medicaid and Medicare.

It doesn’t take an expert to understand that diet plays a pivotal role in this epidemic, which is why the US Food & Drug Administration has been revising labeling requirements for the past 20 years. The most recent of these revisions were released last year, guidelines which are designed to make assessing nutritional content of individual items and side-by-side comparison shopping easier.

Primary among the food labeling changes is enlarging calorie information, adjusting portion size to what people actually eat and adding a line item showing the percentage of added sugars. Food manufacturers must have compliant labels in place by next year, but the vending machine labels that keep coming up missing in Garner’s spot-checks are already supposed to be deployed.

“When you walk up to your soda vending machine, it’s pretty clear that water has zero calories, but everything else in there should have the calories visible,” she says. “If it’s a solid front machine they should have, by the picture of the beverage, the portion size and the amount of calories in that vended item.”

Garner’s not quite sure which government entity is technically in charge of enforcing the new rules, but it’s clear the label police haven’t made it a priority. Until they do, she’ll stay on the case.

“It’s sad, when people are trying to take personal responsibility and are looking for information to help them make informed choices,” she says. “It’s just going to take gnawing away and getting people to look and start saying ‘Hey, tell me what’s in here.’”