WASHINGTON — General Mills, Kellogg’s and the rest of the nation’s cereal makers are mad at the FDA. So are packaged food companies, the pasta industry and the pickle lobby (yes, it exists).
The companies behind America’s favorite culinary indulgences are worried their products wouldn’t be considered “healthy” under a recent Food and Drug Administration proposal — and they’re calling on regulators to reconsider.
SNAC International, which represents companies such as chip makers Frito-Lay and Utz, says the FDA’s restrictions on added sugars and salt are too restrictive.
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Meanwhile, Barilla and De Cecco and other brands represented by the National Pasta Association argue that noodles are healthy because pasta eaters often have higher quality diets and eat more vegetables. (He funded the peer-reviewed study that supports that claim.)
Pickle Packers International says pickles won’t be considered healthy under FDA rules because they’re too salty — even though “pickles have a role to play in a healthy diet because they’re made up mostly of vegetables and serve as a delicious spice to others. nutrient-dense foods.”
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Even frozen-favorite Healthy Choice says it couldn’t follow the FDA’s new guidelines “without alienating consumers.”
“If the food doesn’t taste good, people won’t buy it, and Healthy Choice® — and the health benefits it has provided for more than 30 years — could disappear from the market,” wrote Conagra, the food giant behind the brand.
The FDA issued the guidelines in September, arguing that to be marketed as “healthy,” foods must include a certain amount of key nutrients, such as fruits and vegetables, and be low in added sugar, sodium and saturated. fat. The agency’s proposal would not ban junk food; those that do not meet the FDA standard simply cannot be labeled as healthy.
The backlash could have a real impact on the FDA’s push to update food labels.
The Consumer Brands Association, which represents packaged food corporations such as Hostess, Mondelēz, General Mills and both Pepsi and Coca-Cola, is so upset by the FDA’s proposal that it is hinting it may sue. In a 54-page comment, the group says the regulation infringes on food companies’ First Amendment rights.
“Manufacturers have the right to label foods that are objectively ‘healthy’ as such, based on a definition of ‘healthy’ that is true, factual and non-controversial,” the group wrote. “We are concerned that restricting the true and non-misleading use of the word ‘healthy’ in product labeling could harm both the consumer and the manufacturer.”
The Consumer Brands Association has created its own alternative framework that would make it easier to qualify foods as healthy. Foods with high nutrient content such as fiber and potassium, for example, may qualify under the CBA proposal, even if they do not include a significant amount of healthy foods, such as fruits and vegetables.
The quick reaction from the food industry is a clear example of the challenges the FDA has faced in trying to more closely regulate nutrition in the United States. It took the FDA nearly six years to come up with its proposed “healthy” guidelines. Throughout time, other nations have placed much stricter restrictions on unhealthy foods. Countries like Mexico, Chile and Israel, for example, require food manufacturers to include large warnings on the front of their packages when they contain excess sodium, fat or sugar. (The FDA announced in January that it was studying how to implement a similar warning, more than a decade after Congress directed the federal government to consider the idea.)
“It’s surprising to see the amount of pushback,” said Eva Greenthal, a senior policy scientist at the Center for Science in the Public Interest. “The FDA has completed its work [it]but the agency should simply focus on its mission to protect public health and resist pressure from industry whose sole mission is to profit at the cost of our health.”
Federal regulators set a high bar for a food to be labeled healthy. A frozen salmon meal with beans and rice can have no more than 2.5 grams per serving of added sugar, more than 690 milligrams of sodium and more than 4 grams of saturated fat to be considered healthy, according to the site of the FDA website. (Choice’s Healthy Barbecue Steak Dinner has 16 grams of added sugar, though it meets the FDA’s criteria for sodium and saturated fat.)
Even supporters of stricter nutrition policies admit that most of the food Americans eat won’t be able to carry the label.
“Hardly anything would qualify, so of course the food manufacturers don’t like the idea,” said Marion Nestle, a professor emeritus of nutrition and public health at New York University, who added that the FDA’s regulation “automatically excludes the vast majority of heavily processed. supermarket foods, as well as many plant-based meats, eggs and dairy products,” from maintaining the healthy claim.
But the FDA’s proposal received overwhelmingly positive remarks from nutrition experts, who say it’s a significant advance from the FDA’s previous rules governing healthy foods, which were finalized in the 1990s. The proposal was supported from the American Association for Nutrition, the Association of State Public Health Nutritionists, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. In fact, many of those groups are asking the FDA to go further, noting that some of the FDA’s rules could be applied to allow unhealthy foods to still carry the healthy label.
The FDA’s requirement for added sugar is perhaps the most controversial among food manufacturers.
The National Candy Association, which represents Hershey’s, Haribo and Tootsie Roll, told the agency to loosen the sugar proposal and instead “meet people where they are.” (The group’s spokesman insists it has no problem with the FDA’s proposal in general.)
Under the proposal, cereal and dairy products can only have 2.5 grams of added sugar per serving. Other products, such as fruits, vegetables, meat, nuts and eggs may not have any added sugar at all. This requirement would prevent a number of foods that Americans have come to recognize as healthy, such as raisin bran cereal, from carrying the healthy label.
Kind, the granola bar company that first petitioned the FDA in 2015 to revise its definition of health, is also raising concerns with the agency’s approach to sugar. While the FDA agreed to Kind’s main request — ensuring that nuts won’t count toward the amount of saturated fat allowed in a healthy food — the company also takes issue with the agency’s strict rules on added sugar.
Yogurt maker Chobani raised similar concerns, noting that “reducing sugars to the level proposed by the FDA for the ‘healthy’ claim would result in significant, detrimental effects on product quality, taste, and texture.”
Some of the backlash is to be expected: the FDA’s previous health labeling rules set similar limits on saturated fat and salt, but did not include any limits on allowed added sugar.
The Consumer Brands Association even argues that the FDA may not have the legal authority to set such a strict limit on added sugar “given the lack of scientific consensus on the relationship between sugar intake and diet-related diseases.” (The group does not provide proof of that claim.)
The American Heart Association, in contrast, applauded sugar limits, noting: “Added sugars are an important source of excess calories and are associated with higher overall caloric intake and higher body weight. [and are] It is also linked to certain metabolic abnormalities, lack of essential nutrients and increased risk of high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes and inflammation in the body.
STAT’s coverage of commercial determinants of health is supported by a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies. our financial supporters are not involved in any decisions about our journalism.
