FDA Will Let Food Industry Put Health Claims on Labels
The Food and Drug Administration announced a plan Thursday to give consumers more information about the nutritional content of the food they eat while allowing industry to make health claims for which there may be little scientific evidence.
“People will choose to live better lives when they have accurate and helpful information about their choices,” FDA Commissioner Mark B. McClellan said at a news conference.
The event marked the administration’s second significant food-labeling policy announcement this week. On Wednesday, McClellan and Health and Human Services Secretary Tommy G. Thompson announced that food marketers would have to list the amount of unhealthful “trans fatty acids” in their products.
McClellan said the FDA’s latest action was part of a “coordinated government effort” to encourage Americans to make more informed choices that will improve their health.
But critics said the Bush administration’s information-heavy approach to food health claims is regulation-lite.
Until now, the FDA has required “significant scientific agreement” before food marketers have been allowed to make health claims about their products. The new FDA standard requires only that health claims be supported by “the weight of scientific evidence.”
The relaxed standard “means claims can be made on the basis of hope, not fact,” said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles). “That makes a mockery of food labels and will lead to the return of what former [HHS] Secretary Louis Sullivan rightly called ‘a tower of Babel’ in the supermarket.”
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit health-advocacy group, called the FDA action “the biggest rollback in food-labeling standards in 20 years.”
But the National Food Processors Assn., which first sought FDA permission for “greater flexibility” of health-claim wording on food labels nine years ago, praised the new policy.
“FDA should permit -- even encourage -- the communication of all forms of truthful, non-misleading and well-substantiated statements on food product labels,” said Rhona Appelbaum, executive vice president of the group, which represents the $500-billion food processing industry.
Beginning Sept. 1, the FDA will review all health claims made on the labels of food products and dietary supplements, McClellan said.
It will first focus on claims that are considered scientifically proved -- eating several servings a week of salmon, tuna and mackerel, which are rich in omega-3 fatty acids, reduces the risk of heart disease, for example -- but are not regularly featured on product labels.
The agency will then grade the statements according to a “health claims report card.” Claims for which there is “significant scientific agreement” -- calcium reduces the risk of osteoporosis, for example -- would receive an A or “high” rating.
Claims for which scientific evidence is “not conclusive” would receive a B or “moderate” rating, while statements for which “evidence is limited and not conclusive” would be rated C for “low.” A rating of D or “extremely low” would indicate that there was “little scientific evidence supporting” a health claim on a product label.
Ranking health claims in such a way will “increase America’s nutritional grade-point average,” McClellan said, adding that the process will also encourage food marketers to focus on what is best for consumers’ health.
“Good nutrition should also be good business,” he said.
Because the FDA is conducting additional research to determine the clearest, most effective way to communicate the information, consumers are unlikely to see such ratings on food labels before the end of the year, McClellan said.
McClellan, a doctor, all but nagged Americans about their eating habits.
“Things have been going the wrong direction for more than a decade,” he said, citing dramatic increases in obesity, diabetes and other chronic health conditions. Obesity alone is costing the nation $117 billion a year, he said.
Dr. Andrew von Eschenbach, director of the National Cancer Institute, applauded the government’s expanded role in promoting such healthy habits as eating five to nine servings a day of fruit and vegetables.
The new policy is an important step in helping Americans “avoid the catastrophe of developing diseases such as cancer,” he said.
In a related action, McClellan’s agency issued a report Wednesday intended to show that the FDA and the Federal Trade Commission have cracked down on manufacturers of dietary supplements who make misleading health claims.
In some cases, the FTC filed legal papers in federal court against a supplement manufacturer while, at the same time, the FDA conducted raids on warehouses and seized supplies of supplements falsely promoted as cures for cancers, AIDS, SARS, diabetes and other diseases.
Since December, the FDA has seized products worth almost $9 million, while the FTC has acted to stop the false advertising of products with combined annual sales of more than $1 billion.
