The bill includes additional requirements, including defining what is healthy and adding warnings for objectionable nutrients such as salt, saturated fat, and trans fats that exceed a certain amount.
While some of the provisions can be useful, many of them are problematic. Changing labels will be extremely costly, and manufacturers will add to that cost by eliminating, adding, or redesigning products. Many of these warnings or hasty revisions can also be misguided, as we have seen in the past when the government’s focus on total fat and dietary cholesterol was later discredited.
The proposed law would also require manufacturers to register every labeling and labeling change with the FDA, which would then publish it on the Internet. If manufacturers fail to ship the labels, they will be fined $ 10,000 per day. The law would also make these proposed rules final if not implemented within congressional deadlines, apparently to ensure that future unfriendly governments do not interfere.
Given the vast majority of consumers couldn’t use labels to eat healthy meals, this latest bill may make food activists happy, but its focus is in the wrong direction.
The problem is the rapidly evolving field of precision nutrition. Like Dr. Kevin Hall, Senior Investigator for the National Institutes of Health, notes, “People can react differently to foods and nutrients, and therefore a diet that is best for one person may be very different from another.” That is, each of us has our own genetic profile, microbiome, environment and health status.
