How the FDA’s new nutrition labels could prod the food industry to get healthier 

A new government proposal to display nutritional labels on the front of food packaging is aimed at helping Americans make more informed choices about what they eat. An eventual side effect, research and expert commentary suggests, could be nudging the food industry to make healthier food, too.The Food and Drug Administration on Tuesday unveiled a proposal, long in the works, 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 fats, sodium, and added sugars. Sixty percent of Americans live with at least one chronic disease, and 40% live with two or more.“We believefood should be a vehicle for wellness, not a contributor of chronic disease,” Rebecca Buckner, the agency’s associate deputy director for human food policy, said in a press briefing on Tuesday. The proposed label is a black-and-white box that shows the percentage of the daily recommended amount of sodium, added sugar, and saturated fat included in a serving, and rates whether a serving has a “low,” “medium,” or “high” level of each nutrient. The FDA says the ratings could incentivize manufacturers to reduce levels of those three nutrients, although that’s not the agency’s goal in proposing the change. “We assume there may be manufacturers who would want to reformulate to move from the high to the medium category, or from the medium to low category,” Buckner noted.The FDA’s proposed nutritional information labelCourtesy of FDAThe proposal is open for public comment for the next three months. What happens next will be up to the Trump administration and quite possibly to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who’s pledged to take on the food industry as part of his Make America Healthy Again movement if he is confirmed as the new head of the Department of Health and Human Services.Reactions to the proposal from nutrition experts and the food industry so far are mixed, with both groups objecting to the design of the food label for different reasons. But research does show that when countries around the world introduce new food labels, it can spur manufacturers to change their practices.“When you get mandatory systems, you do see shifts in industry trying to lower the amounts of added sugars or sodium or saturated fats to get under those thresholds to avoid a warning label,” said Christina Roberto, an associate professor of health policy at the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine who has studied the impact of food labeling requirements.That said, she noted, the effects are not always straightforward. The food industry has been lowering the amount of added sugar in products in recent years, but that’s meant introducing more sugar substitutes like aspartame into the food supply. “There is reason to be concerned about that,” she said. “You don’t want to cause some other unintended consequences.”If