Waking Up a Sleepy Agency : New FDA boss has decade of neglect to reverse
Consumers increasingly aware of the connections that scientists have confirmed between diet and a number of major diseases will soon benefit from increasingly accurate health labeling information for many of the foods they eat.
Credit for that goes to Congress, which last year passed a food-labeling law, and to David A. Kessler, the Food and Drug Administration’s new chairman, who believes--as he said in an interview with The Times--not so much in writing more regulations but in enforcing existing laws to inform and protect the public against dangers to its health.
Kessler, who is both a physician and a lawyer, during less than eight months in office has moved to re-energize an agency that had pretty much dozed its way through the last decade. His first venture into activism aims at getting rid of misleading food advertising claims. For openers, the FDA told several companies that had been touting their pasta sauce and orange juice as “fresh” to drop that word, because the products were made from concentrates and “the claim of freshness on processed food products is false.” When the manufacturers dawdled, the FDA impounded 12,000 gallons of the disputed juice. Labeling changes were quickly made.
Similarly, the FDA last month ordered manufacturers of vegetable oils to stop promoting their products as “cholesterol-free.” They are, but FDA says the claim is misleading because many people think that cholesterol is the only kind of fat they should be concerned with, although medical authorities strongly advise reducing the consumption of all fats.
Now Kessler has turned his attention to another misleading area of labeling, one that describes inherently high-fat foods as low fat.
Example: A bologna maker can claim that a single two-ounce slice of his product is 86% fat free. It is, but that’s not the whole story by any means. Two ounces of bologna weighs in at about 56 grams, with eight of those grams coming from fat. One-seventh, or 14%, of the bologna’s weight thus comes from fat, meaning it’s 86% fat-free. But--in a more accurate way to measure fat content--because each gram of fat has nine calories, 72 of the 113 calories in each slice of bologna derives from fat. The meat may be 86% fat free, but a whopping 64% of its calories comes from fat. Consumers who want to limit their fat intake need such information.
This week Kraft General Foods Inc., the nation’s largest food company, confirmed its earlier announced intention to drop all references to the percentage of fat in a number of its products. Kessler praised the move, rightly seeing it as a step toward greater accuracy in labeling. What Kessler wants to see next are more comprehensive nutrition labels on food, including among other things information on what percentage of the recommended maximum daily consumption of fat a serving of a particular product contains.
Everyone has to eat. More and more people want to make sure that the diet they follow promotes health. The FDA is now in a strong position, under an activist leader, to help guide those judgments.
