Nutritional information on the front

The Food and Drug Administration is expected to propose a change to prepackaged foods sold in the United States: a requirement that the front of packages display essential nutrient information in addition to the nutrition label already on the back.

The concept, designed to quickly convey health ramifications to consumers concerned about the foods and drinks they are considering purchasing, is not new: around the world, dozens of countries they already have nutrition labels on the front of the package that come in various designs. In Chile, for example, a stop symbol in front of an item indicates whether it is high in sugar, saturated fat, sodium or calories. In Israel, there is a red warning label on these foods and drinks. And in Singapore, drinks display a letter-based rating based on how nutritious they are.

Advocates have been calling on the FDA for nearly two decades to require front-of-package labels, which they say helps people make healthier choices and encourages food manufacturers to reformulate their recipes so they have fewer warnings. in your products. The FDA remained largely silent on the issue until it announced its intention to explore front-of-pack labels as part of a national health strategy unveiled during a key White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition and Health in 2022. Since then, reviewed literature on front-of-package labeling and conducted focus groups to test label designs.

But the idea faces opposition from trade associations representing U.S. food and beverage manufacturers, which created their own voluntary system for highlighting certain nutrients on the front of packaging more than a decade ago. And some of the label designs considered by the FDA could be challenged on First Amendment grounds.

“The U.S. interprets free speech much more broadly and inclusively of corporate speech than any other country in the world,” said Jennifer Pomeranz, an associate professor at New York University’s School of Global Public Health who researched First Amendment obstacles to mandatory front-of-package food labels.

Designs that are purely factual – indicating the number of grams of added sugars, for example – are more likely to be considered constitutional than interpretive designs that have shapes or colors that characterize a product as unhealthy, its research concluded.

“It starts to get more iffy when you get into the subjective,” Pomeranz said.

Between the multiple label options tested by the FDA, some used traffic light colors to indicate whether there was a high (red), medium (yellow), or low (green) amount of saturated fat, sodium, or added sugars; others stated whether a product was “rich” in these nutrients, sometimes adding the percentage of the recommended daily value that a serving contains.

An FDA spokesperson declined to disclose to NBC News what label design it will use and would not say exactly when the agency will release its proposed rule other than to say “the goal is for this summer,” despite previously setting a deadline. of this month.

The Consumer Brands Association and food industry association FMI, which created a voluntary label system for the food and beverage industry called Facts Ahead launched in 2011, have made it clear that they are against mandatory interpretive projects such as a red light/green light system. Interpretive labels “will increase unnecessary fear in consumers based on a single limiting nutrient without providing meaningful information about how that food may fit into overall healthy eating patterns,” they wrote in a statement. public comment to the FDA in 2022.

They also say their voluntary system meets consumers’ needs. Facts up Front uses up to four icons on the front of packaging to highlight calories, saturated fat, sodium and added sugars per serving. Manufacturers can also include nutritional information on up to two “nutrients to encourage,” such as potassium or fiber. The Consumer Brands Association says hundreds of thousands of products bring the facts to the forefront: 207,000 foods and drinks featured them in 2021, according to the group’s most recent data available.

“It’s really about giving consumers a quick, consistent, holistic view of the nutritional makeup of everything they’re buying and then helping those consumers make informed decisions,” said Sarah Gallo, the association’s vice president of product policy.

Proponents of mandatory front-of-package labeling disagree, arguing that the Facts up Front campaign is not used enough: On the other hand, the nutrition facts label that is federally mandated to be on the back or sides of packages appears on billions of products.

“Front-of-package labeling is only trusted by consumers if it appears across the entire food supply, and not just on products from a handful of manufacturers who opt into a voluntary program,” said Eva Greenthal, senior policy scientist at the foods. and the health advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest, which first petitioned the FDA in 2006 to implement front-of-package labels.

She also said Facts up Front doesn’t provide enough context to be helpful.

“Facts up Front does not provide any additional tools to help the consumer interpret this information,” she said. “We need something like the word ‘high’.”

Courtney Gaine, president and CEO of the Sugar Association, the trade association for the U.S. sugar industry, said her group supports transparency but questions whether mandatory front-of-package labeling will improve Americans’ diets.

“It just doesn’t seem like there’s evidence to show that it’s going to make a difference,” she said.

But Greenthal and other advocates say there is data from around the world that supports this idea. In Chile, which in 2016 became the first country to apply nutritional information to the front of packaging, studies show that people did healthier consumer purchases and are choosing between healthier products product reformulations.

“I think it’s a very classic anti-regulatory tactic for the food industry to deny that science supports a new policy that may be difficult to implement but is beneficial to society,” Greenthal said.

In its own review of the scientific literature on front-of-package labels, the FDA concluded that labels “can help consumers identify healthy foods” and “appear useful to those with lower nutritional knowledge and busy shoppers.”

The discussion comes as the percentage of Americans considered overweight or obese raisedwith obesity affecting about 42% of U.S. adults. More than 1 million Americans die from diet-related diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and certain types of cancer annually, according to the FDA.

The statistics don’t mean that the nutrition facts box that became mandatory on the back or sides of food packaging three decades ago has been a failure, said Xaq Frohlich, associate professor of history at Auburn University and author of the book “From Label for Table: Food Regulation in America in the Information Age.”

“Every time there has been a label change, the food industry has reformulated their foods,” he said. “So even if you don’t read the label, food is changing and it’s having this kind of impact.”

Greenthal said there are many people who would benefit from more nutritional information on the front of packaging: busy parents running around the grocery store, people with low levels of nutritional literacy and anyone else with limited time and energy to invest in their food choices.

“Policies like front-of-package labeling couldn’t come sooner,” she said. “Chronic diseases related to diet are one of the most important problems facing our country and which harm the health of our population.”