Have you ever been confused about whether or not to eat a food that was labeled "sell by" or "best by?"

According a study from the Natural Resources Defense Council, due to uncertainty about the different labels including "best by," "use by," and "best before," customers are both wasting food that has not actually gone bad or eating food that's no longer safe to consume. 

"The date labeling system in the U.S. is not a system at all. It is a mess," said Dana Gunder, food and agriculture staff scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Based on a survey by the Food Marketing Institute, 9 out of 10 Americans to throw away food needlessly.

"The lack of binding federal standards, and the resultant state and local regulatory variability in date labeling rules, has led to a proliferation of diverse and inconsistent date labeling practices in the food industry," the survey stated. "Open dates can come in a dizzying variety of forms, none of which are strictly defined or regulated at the federal level. This haphazard system is not serving its purpose well."

Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic's report, titled "The Dating Game: How Confusing Food Date Labels Lead to Food Waste in America" said the wear in food leads Americans to lose thousands of dollars every year. According to study, 90 percent of consumers throw they food away on the sell by date.

Emily Broad Leib, lead author of the study "The Dating Game," and director of Harvard Law School's Food Law and Policy Clinic researched how manufacturers set the dates on their food products, discovering some manufacturers conduct taste tests that will factor into the expiration date.

"[Manufacturers are] picking dates that are really protective over their brand, which is fine," Leib said. "It's just important for consumers to know that."

Leib said consumers are unaware that these dates are not necessarily linked with food safety. As a result, about 160 billion tons of food are wasted every year.

"Consumers need to take that extra minute to actually look at their food and smell their food and make an assessment," Leib said. "When we just rely on these dates and throw everything away after the date, we're leading to really high rates of food waste."

The NRDC offers several recommendations to remedy the current system, such as establishing labels that indicate both quality- and safety-based dates. 

The authors suggest that current "sell by" dates should be made invisible to customers and labels should instead offer more information about handling food safely.