FDA Working to Replace Misleading Food Labels

Several food labeling schemes being considered and studied by the FDA in their effort to come up with new regulations governing front-of-package labels.

(Image credit: FDA)

NEW YORK — The aisles of American supermarkets can be bewildering places these days, lined with dozens of variations of cereals, crackers, chips and other foods, many of which boast of their supposed healthfulness — this yogurt is "low fat," while this cereal is "heart healthy," and those chips have "0 grams trans fat." What claims are the conscientious eater to trust and what foods should they pick to put on their table?

This question has become harder and harder for shoppers to answer, as health problems associated with poor diets, such as heart disease and obesity, affect more U.S. residents each year. Meanwhile, studies show that Americans want more and better guidance on what foods to eat.

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The rising obesity epidemic in the United States (more than 30 percent of U.S. adults are now obese), combined with the proliferation of various labeling schemes and the worries about the potentially misleading nature of some of these schemes, has prompted the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to conduct a review of so-called front-of-package labeling. The aim is to come up with a standard set of regulations that would govern what claims manufacturers can make on these food labels.

But manufacturers argued that since they were required to put potentially negative nutrition information on their foods (for example, the number of calories or grams of fat), they should also be allowed to point out their product's positives. Congress agreed and told the FDA to allow health claims that were backed up by a reasonable amount of science, Nestle said. After that, front-of-package claims exploded.

DeLancey said criteria must be met for foods to bear claims such as "high in fiber" or "low in salt" — fiber in the food must be above a certain amount and salt below a certain amount. But when such claims appear on many breakfast cereals and snack foods that may also be high in sugar or calories, the result can be consumer confusion and consumption of foods that aren't actually healthy, Nestle said.

For claims such as "low fat," "high fiber," and "cholesterol-free," 38 percent of respondents said they often used such claims, while 34 percent said they did sometimes. The survey found that 41 percent of respondents trust that all or most of the nutrient claims such as "low fat" or "high fiber" are accurate, while 56 percent believe that some or none of them are accurate, pointing to confusion on the part of consumers over what labels they can trust.

An online survey of 1,045 adults by FoodMinds — a food and nutrition company — found U.S. consumers seem to want the government to help clear up the confusion. Their survey, conducted in January this year, found that 86 percent of respondents were interested in the government implementing objective front-of-package labeling that highlights calories and beneficial nutrients in a food. And 77 percent were interested in labels that would warn them when a food was high calorie and low in nutrients; 64 percent said they would eat less of or stop buying a food that had such a warning.

The attention brought to labeling by this and other articles, complaints from consumers and advocates, and the sheer number of labeling schemes being used prompted the FDA to send out warning letters to some manufacturers in October 2009 asking them to review their own labels for accuracy. The FDA also notified the companies the FDA would begin its own review of such schemes. (Smart Choices was voluntarily suspended in October pending the FDA review.)

Various labeling schemes have been used and proposed: Some list just a couple key points of nutrition, such as calories, accompanied by a check mark or other symbol; some are a truncated version of the Nutrition Facts label that show key points, such as calories, fat, sugar and sodium; others include on top of that information a "traffic light" symbol (something that has been used with success in the United Kingdom) by each nutrient that indicates whether that nutrient is in the acceptable range (green) or not (red).

DeLancey noted a phenomenon called the "truncation effect" as one consideration in any scheme: Customers might be in a hurry to get dinner on the table or have kids they're trying to keep an eye on, and "that keeps people from turning around and looking at the Nutrition Facts label." So the easier-to-use and more accurate any scheme is, the more likely it is to result in a shopper picking a healthy food option.

The consumer studies the FDA is conducting are slated to finish at the end of this year or the beginning of next. The next step will be to use the information from these and the IOM report to come up with a draft set of regulations to govern front-of-package labeling, to be published in the Federal Register, and then open that draft up to a period of public comment. Once any "substantive" comments (those that make legitimate suggestions and critiques) have been addressed, the FDA can adopt the regulation.

Andrea Thompson is an associate editor at Scientific American, where she covers sustainability, energy and the environment. Prior to that, she was a senior writer covering climate science at Climate Central and a reporter and editor at Live Science, where she primarily covered Earth science and the environment. She holds a graduate degree in science health and environmental reporting from New York University, as well as a bachelor of science and and masters of science in atmospheric chemistry from the Georgia Institute of Technology.