Published: Monday, October 26, 2009
IN OUR VIEW / FOOD LABELING
Not-so-smart food choices
Our under-staffed and over-tasked Food and Drug Administration, when not busy approving and recalling the pharmaceutical companies' latest and greatest drugs, or belatedly dealing with frightening melamine contaminations and E. coli outbreaks, is also charged with ensuring truth in the broad category of “food labeling.”
Once a simple process, food labeling is now an industry unto itself. What started, and continues to be, an excellent practice is the part of the label that provides the nutritional content — the number of calories, the amount of fat, protein per serving, etc. This is valuable, verifiable information.
What is not helpful at all — and one of the many areas where the FDA must forever play catch-up because free speech means right-until-proven-wrong promises when selling something — are all the nutritional claims crowding food labels and commercials these days.
So the FDA wastes time studying Dannon yogurt ads and other “super food” and “not-so-super food” claims.
Last week it launched an “investigation” into nutrition claims made by companies participating in an industry-funded food-labeling program called “Smart Choices.”
Days after the investigation began, the Smart Choices Program said it would “voluntarily postpone active operations and not encourage wider use of the logo at his time by either new or currently enrolled employees.” (The logo has a big green checkmark below the official sounding “Smart Choices Program ... Guiding Food Choices.”)
When the project began, respected nutritionists and medical people were on board. When they saw that the program was being hijacked by industry participants, many bailed out, and said why. The result, the food industry's novel, “1984” style designation of healthful offerings: Froot Loops, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Krispies, Kraft's Strawberry Bagel-ful and Macaroni and Cheese Baked Cheese Crackers are all among those items labeled “Smart Choices.”
“We continue to believe the Smart Choices Program is an important step in the right direction,” said Mike “Count Chocula” Hughes, head of the program. “Our nutrition criteria are based on sound, consensus science.” The criteria actually came down to: Is it better to eat a sugar-laden cereal, hopefully with milk, or nothing at all? (Good to know those “scientists” formerly employed by the tobacco industry found work in the recession.)
Would it be possible, and palatable, to reside somewhere between a blanket “buyer beware” and a total “nanny state”? Would it really cripple free speech and capitalism to just ban nutritional claims altogether? (We like old-fashioned claims: “Mmm mmm Good.” “They're Grrrreat.” “Magically Delicious.” That kind of thing.) That way no one can sue over vague promises about yogurt. It would free the FDA to focus more on food and drug safety, a smart choice.
Once a simple process, food labeling is now an industry unto itself. What started, and continues to be, an excellent practice is the part of the label that provides the nutritional content — the number of calories, the amount of fat, protein per serving, etc. This is valuable, verifiable information.
What is not helpful at all — and one of the many areas where the FDA must forever play catch-up because free speech means right-until-proven-wrong promises when selling something — are all the nutritional claims crowding food labels and commercials these days.
So the FDA wastes time studying Dannon yogurt ads and other “super food” and “not-so-super food” claims.
Last week it launched an “investigation” into nutrition claims made by companies participating in an industry-funded food-labeling program called “Smart Choices.”
Days after the investigation began, the Smart Choices Program said it would “voluntarily postpone active operations and not encourage wider use of the logo at his time by either new or currently enrolled employees.” (The logo has a big green checkmark below the official sounding “Smart Choices Program ... Guiding Food Choices.”)
When the project began, respected nutritionists and medical people were on board. When they saw that the program was being hijacked by industry participants, many bailed out, and said why. The result, the food industry's novel, “1984” style designation of healthful offerings: Froot Loops, Lucky Charms, Cocoa Krispies, Kraft's Strawberry Bagel-ful and Macaroni and Cheese Baked Cheese Crackers are all among those items labeled “Smart Choices.”
“We continue to believe the Smart Choices Program is an important step in the right direction,” said Mike “Count Chocula” Hughes, head of the program. “Our nutrition criteria are based on sound, consensus science.” The criteria actually came down to: Is it better to eat a sugar-laden cereal, hopefully with milk, or nothing at all? (Good to know those “scientists” formerly employed by the tobacco industry found work in the recession.)
Would it be possible, and palatable, to reside somewhere between a blanket “buyer beware” and a total “nanny state”? Would it really cripple free speech and capitalism to just ban nutritional claims altogether? (We like old-fashioned claims: “Mmm mmm Good.” “They're Grrrreat.” “Magically Delicious.” That kind of thing.) That way no one can sue over vague promises about yogurt. It would free the FDA to focus more on food and drug safety, a smart choice.
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