The FDA’s new, same-old food labels demand better obesity solutions

With President Trump back in the Oval Office and Robert F. Kennedy possibly to follow at the Department of Health and Human Services, it’s hard to say what’s in store for the Food and Drug Administration. But if the agency is going to be scrutinized, its recent decision to double down on food labeling — a wasteful distraction in the fight against obesity — would be a great place to start.

New labels will soon alert consumers to information already on the back of food packaging about low, medium or high levels of sodium, added sugars and saturated fat. The FDA believes this shortened label will accomplish what the older, more complete labels have utterly failed to do in changing consumer choices for the last 30 years.

A citizen petition requested a “clear, quick and easy way to access and understand” these foods and “encourage healthier diets.” FDA performed lots of consumer testing, including focus groups and experimental studies on labels that would capture consumers’ attention and “help them quickly and easily identify how foods can be part of a healthy diet.”

This label will not do that. All things considered, it’s at least as likely to make health outcomes worse as it is to make most people healthier. What it will do is cost hundreds of millions of dollars that will be passed on to already-high food prices.

FDA, probably wisely, declined to estimate the reduced number of cases of heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other related chronic diseases they expect to see.

But the implication of the new label, which will have to displace other information, is that consumers are too lazy or uninterested to turn the package over and read it. With information now on the front, we’re expected to pay more attention and manufacturers will probably reformulate products to show “low” amounts of the “unhealthy” added sugars, saturated fat and sodium (sodium may be unhealthy in excess, but it’s also an essential nutrient).

That’s precisely how manufacturers responded to the FDA’s nutrition facts panels mandate in the 1990s, although back then, the focus was on total fat. The sugar industry had paid for articles that downplayed sugar and put attention on fat. It turns out that there are good fats (poly and monounsaturated) and bad fats (trans fatty acids and saturated fats), although there is still some controversy over some of those designations.

We do not know exactly what manufacturers will do to reformulate their foods. One example of unintended effects happened when, pressured by food activist organizations lobbying for reformulation away from animal fats (e.g., lard), manufacturers substituted the much worse trans fatty acids.

All in all, manufacturers reformulated lots of food at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars and the benefit to consumers was, well, probably nothing.

I know this because it was my job to estimate those benefits. As I learned more over time, I could see that I was misled by much of the nutrition literature. Part of the problem is, as obesity theorist and computational physiologist Edward Archer bluntly says, much of the “[nutrition] data is meaningless.”

One of the things that the FDA should remember is the “halo” effect.

Five years after the nutrition facts panels went into effect, FDA consumer researchers identified how claims on the front of a food package affect consumers’ overall evaluation of its healthiness. A claim such as “it may reduce the risk of diabetes,” or “it’s low in sodium,” can cause consumers to view the food as healthy overall. That is precisely what focusing on these three attributes does.

The main problem is that we’re looking for easy solutions where they don’t exist. There are essential nutrients that some of us are not getting enough of, including Vitamins A, C, D, B-12, E, iron, calcium, potassium, folate and magnesium. Only 7 percent of us get a sufficient amount of fiber, which is important for cardiovascular health.

Perhaps more importantly, the average American consumes more than 3,600 calories per day, an increase of 38 percent since the nutrition facts panels appeared in 1994. None of these are on the proposed front label.

Beyond that, we all have different needs to suit different characteristics including health status, physical activity, genetics, microbiome, metabolic profile, environment and food preferences. A healthy individual diet takes into account all of these factors.

An accurate, scientific approach requires intake data and body monitoring, an understanding of diet-disease relationships and data extracted from devices to produce recommendations from complex algorithms. In other words, medical devices that are currently overregulated by the FDA.

Public health is too important to repeat the same mistakes, and the answer isn’t in the 1990s. It’s time to focus on the future.

Richard Williams is a senior affiliated scholar with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, former director for social sciences at the FDA’s Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, and board chairman with the Center for Truth in Science.

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