The Food and Drug Administration is expected to propose a change to prepackaged food sold in America: a requirement that the front of the packages display key nutrient information in addition to the nutrition label that’s already on the back.
The concept, designed to quickly convey health ramifications to busy consumers about the food and beverages they are considering purchasing, is not novel: Worldwide, dozens of countries already have front-of-package nutrition labels that come in various designs. In Chile, for example, a stop sign symbol on the front of an item indicates if it has high sugar, saturated fat, sodium or calories. In Israel, there’s a red warning label on such food and drinks. And in Singapore, beverages display a letter grade based on how nutritious they are.
Advocates have been asking the FDA for nearly two decades to require front-of-pack labels, which they say help people make healthier choices and prod food manufacturers to reformulate their recipes so they have fewer warnings on their products. The FDA stayed largely silent on the issue until it announced intentions to explore front-of-pack labels as part of a national health strategy released during a landmark White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health in 2022. Since then, it has reviewed literature on front-of-pack labeling and conducted focus groups to test designs for labels.
But the idea faces opposition from trade associations representing America’s food and beverage makers, who created their own voluntary system for highlighting certain nutrients on the front of packages over a decade ago. And some of the label designs being considered by the FDA could be challenged on First Amendment grounds.
“The U.S. does interpret free speech much broader and more inclusive of corporate speech than any other country in the world,” said Jennifer Pomeranz, an associate professor at the New York University School of Global Public Health who has researched First Amendment obstacles to mandating front-of-package food labels.
Designs that are purely factual — stating 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, her research found.
“It starts to get more iffy when you go into subjective,” Pomeranz said.
Among 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 if a product was “high in” those nutrients, sometimes adding the percentage of the recommended daily value that a serving size contains.
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