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How the FDA’s new nutrition labels can push the food industry to become healthier

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How the FDA's new nutrition labels can push the food industry to become healthier

A new government proposal Placing nutrition labels on the front of food packages is intended to help Americans make more informed choices about what they eat. A possible side effect, according to research and commentary from experts, could encourage the food industry to also make healthier food.

The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday unveiled a long-in-the-work proposal for a mandatory food labeling system that it says is intended to combat chronic diseases, including heart disease, cancer and diabetes, that have been linked to excessive consumption of saturated fatty acids. fats, sodium and added sugars. Sixty percent of Americans live with it at least one chronic diseaseand 40% live with two or more.

“We believe Food should be a tool for well-being, not a contributor to chronic disease,” Rebecca Buckner, the agency’s deputy director for human food policy, said at a news conference Tuesday.

The proposed label is a black and white box that displays the percentage of the daily recommended amount of sodium, added sugar and saturated fat contained in a serving, and indicates whether a serving has a “low,” “medium,” or “high” level of each nutrient. The FDA says the reviews could incentivize manufacturers to reduce levels of these three nutrients, although that is not the agency’s goal in proposing the change. “We assume that there are manufacturers who would want to reformulate to move from the high to the mid range, or from the mid to the low range,” Buckner noted.

The FDA’s proposed nutritional information labelCourtesy of the FDA

The proposal will be open for public comment for the next three months. What happens next will be up to the Trump administration and possibly Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has pledged to take on the food industry as part of his Make America Healthy Again movement if confirmed as the new head of the Ministry of Justice. Health and Human Services.

Reaction to the proposal from nutritionists and the food industry has been mixed so far, with both groups objecting to the food label design for different reasons. But research does show that when countries around the world introduce new food labels, it can prompt manufacturers to change their practices.

“When you get mandatory systems in place, you see shifts in the industry trying to reduce the amounts of added sugars, sodium or saturated fats to get below those thresholds and avoid a warning label,” said Christina Roberto, associate professor of health policy at the University of California. The University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine, which has studied the impact of food labeling requirements.

That said, she noted, the effects are not always clear. The food industry has reduced the amount of added sugars in products in recent years, but that means introducing more sugar substitutes such as aspartame into the food supply. “There is reason to be concerned about that,” she says. “You don’t want to cause other unintended consequences.”

How will the food industry respond?

If the rule is finalized under the incoming Trump administration, manufacturers with annual food sales of $10 million or more would have to comply within three years of the effective date, and smaller manufacturers would have to comply within four years.

Food industry trade groups appeared poised to push back on at least some elements of the proposed label, particularly the fact that it focuses exclusively on nutrients consumed in excess rather than also on healthy nutrients, such as fiber.

“The FDA’s proposed front-of-pack nutrition labeling rule appears to be based on opaque methodology and ignoring industry input and collaboration,” said Sarah Gallo, senior vice president of product policy at Consumer Brands Association in a statement.

The label’s focus on just three nutrients is “too simplistic and will not help educate consumers on how to improve their overall diet,” said Jennifer Hatcher, chief public policy officer of the Food Industry Association trading group. However, she said the group appreciated that calories could be voluntarily listed next to the label, as well as “the agency’s decision to maintain a black-and-white FOP labeling system and include at least some quantitative values. ”

In contrast, the FDA’s announcement was welcomed by the advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest, which – along with the Association of SNAP Nutrition Education Administrators and the Association of State Public Health Nutritionists – filed a petition in 2022 calling on the agency to introduce mandatory front-of-pack labeling.

The nutrition label “will provide information that can help people make healthier choices” and is “certainly an improvement over the status quo,” said Eva Greenthal, senior policy scientist at CSPI.

Yet the label’s format has already proven controversial, with some health experts, including Greenthal and Roberto, saying evidence shows a so-called “high-in” warning label – which warns people that a particular product is high in sodium, saturated. fats or sugar – is easier for consumers to understand at a glance.

The proposed label, which tells people whether the food is high, medium or low in each of the three nutrients, “could be confusing for consumers,” Roberto says. “It’s like standing at a traffic light that’s red and green at the same time and you don’t know what to do. It contains little sugar, but a lot of sodium. Is it good, is it bad?

Dariush Mozaffarian, a professor at the Tufts Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, applauded the FDA’s recently updated definition of “healthy” food, but said the focus on ingredients like saturated fats and sugar is a “very 1980s” throwback to a more simplistic system. insight into nutritional science.

“You can’t define a food based on just a few nutrients, it leads to mistakes and deception,” says Mozaffarian, citing the example of the low-fat craze of the 1990s, which swept the U.S. with SnackWells cookies and olestra -chips.

When food companies reformulate their products in response to the labels, he said, “you get starchy, artificially healthy products and not minimally processed foods with lots of healthy ingredients.”

What the research shows

However, there are some hopeful signs of how the food industry has responded to labeling initiatives in other countries. Manufacturers are often incentivized to reduce the amounts of sugar and salt in packaged foods to stay below certain nutritional thresholds, according to a 2021 article published in the Annual review of nutrition.

An instructive example is Chile, which in 2016 began requiring foods to have warning labels on the front of the package if they met the threshold for high sodium, added sugars, saturated fats or calories.

Within a year of the law’s introduction, the share of packaged foods high in sugar fell from 80% to 60%, and the share of foods high in sodium fell from 74% to 27%, according to a study. 2020 study. In most cases, the new nutrient levels fell just below the threshold for a warning label.

The law was less successful in encouraging the food industry to reduce the levels of saturated fats in their products, which the authors say may be because saturated fats were technically more difficult to replace. “Saturated fat is a lot trickier, especially when it comes to things like mouthfeel,” says Roberto.

The food industry could also get around the label’s intended effect by reducing portion sizes, says Montserrat Ganderats-Fuentes, a food policy and public health researcher at Arizona State University. “That could lead to misunderstandings and may not encourage the food industry to reformulate.”

Food companies may be reluctant to reformulate because they fear customers will reject an unfamiliar flavor. (To see: New Coke.) But on the plus side, labeling systems can encourage companies to develop new, healthier, compliant products, Ganderats-Fuentes said. That’s what happened in both Britain and the Netherlands, and one study shows it 29% of the products with the Dutch designation of healthy food were introduced after the implementation of the program.

Ideally, experts say, these types of policies are a way for the FDA to indirectly influence industry practices while operating within its legal authority. “People don’t even have to change their individual behavior,” says Greenthal. “The food supply is only getting healthier, and we all benefit from that.”

STAT’s coverage of chronic health conditions is supported by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. Us financial supporters are not involved in decisions about our journalism.

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