Be sure to give consumers the bad news.
That’s the emphasis in a new report submitted to the Food and Drug Administration. It proposes placing simplified health labels on the front of food products and emphasizing the items’ potentially harmful nutritional contents.
The proposal — prepared by the Institute of Medicine, an arm of the National Academy of Sciences — suggests that information regarding saturated fat, calories and sodium, which can contribute to obesity and diabetes, should be on the front of the packaging, not hidden in small print on the back.
The institute argues that such new measures are necessary to counteract food industry marketing techniques, which often tout a product’s health bona fides (say, vitamins) while ignoring the more harmful content (i.e. trans fat). The result is that some products, such as sugar-saturated cereals, that are nobody’s idea of nutritious, portray themselves as part of a healthy diet because they have low levels of fat.
The proposal comes in the midst of a year-long process by the FDA to revamp the food labeling system and is meant to advise the agency and Congress. The Institute says that it will follow up with another report next year with formal policy recommendations.
Industry groups reacted coolly to the proposal, The New York Times reports. Scott Faber, a vice president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association, said industry officials are in talks with the FDA, adding: “Providing consumers with more nutritional information is an essential ingredient of building a healthy diet.”
