Whether you shop for food in a traditional grocery store, a big-box store, a bodega or a gas station, you’ll have to contend with the reality that many if not most of your options are junk — highly processed foods often loaded with sugar, salt and chemical additives.
You’ll also have to contend with a haze of aggressive marketing — terms like “low fat,” “gluten-free,” “paleo,” “keto-friendly” and “a good source of fiber” — that doesn’t answer the fundamental question: Is this food good for me? An orange is a simple enough choice, but a frozen dinner? There is little reliable guidance available for people who don’t have the time, patience or skill to analyze the dense nutrition labels on food packaging.
What could help is a system giving consumers important nutrition information at a glance on the front of a package: a warning sign that a high-sugar soda or breakfast cereal product, for example, is an unhealthy choice. The bold move here would be to steer people away from food that’s bad for them.
These kinds of labels, of course, are the last thing most large food manufacturers want on their products. But a few countries, mostly in Latin America, have begun to require or encourage such labeling, and there’s some early evidence that it’s already having a positive effect on the way people eat.
With some 60 percent of the American diet coming from processed foods — foods that have been linked to an increased risk for diabetes, heart disease and some cancers in the United States — it’s time for our government to update our labels with warnings, too.
Not so long ago, the United States was a world leader in informative food labeling: In the 1960s, Congress passed legislation to mandate that food companies place ingredient lists on all products in interstate commerce. About seven years later, nutrition labeling was expanded for some foods to include the number of calories and amounts of protein, carbohydrates, fat and certain micronutrients. In 1990 the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, a response to the growing number of confusing nutritional claims on packages, required food companies to make consistent claims and include a standardized nutrition fact panel on their products.
But as a concession to industry, Congress also allowed food producers, with approval from the Food and Drug Administration, to print claims about reduced disease risk on certain food labels. Oats, for example, could claim to “reduce cholesterol”; foods could be labeled “heart healthy” or indicate that they contain “antioxidants” that “help the immune system,” even though these assertions are overly simplistic.
Chile, Mexico, Brazil and dozens of other countries have worked to change food labeling. Research has suggested that these labels can help people understand nutritional quality and change their purchasing habits. Ultimately, the goal of the labels is to improve nutrition and reduce the consumption of ultraprocessed foods.
After Chile adopted several regulations in 2016 that included advertising restrictions on unhealthy food, a ban on junk food and beverages in schools and warning labels, researchers found that the consumption of drinks high in things like sugar and sodium declined by nearly 25 percent. Researchers have also observed that warning labels led to reductions of sugar, sodium and saturated fat in the food supply. In Uruguay a survey published in 2020 assessing the early effects of nutritional warnings found that 58 percent of participants who noticed the warning changed their decision about buying a product. Of those who changed their decision, 17 percent said they opted for a similar product with fewer warnings, and 18 percent decided not to buy a similar product at all.
Chile and many other countries with front-of-package labels have a constitutional right to health. This helps give authorities the ability not just to require warning labels but also to ban certain health claims and codify advertising restrictions. (Mexico’s Supreme Court recently upheld its front-of-package labeling regulations in part because of the right to health.)
In the United States, new labeling laws will be much more challenging to enact. But there’s reason to believe that we might be ready for a change: In 2022 the White House announced that the F.D.A. would conduct research on and propose a standardized system displaying nutrition information to complement the nutrition facts label on food packages. The F.D.A. hosted a public meeting and focus groups soon thereafter, and its proposal is forthcoming. And last December Representative Jan Schakowsky of Illinois and Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut introduced legislation to direct the F.D.A. to develop warning labels for unhealthy foods and beverages.
As you might expect, food manufacturers will surely go to the mat to stop warning labels from being required. They already are arguing that these plans would be costly and that those costs would be passed on to consumers. But research conducted soon after Chile’s food labeling and advertising law passed showed no effects on aggregate employment and negligible effects on wages and profit margins of the food and beverage sectors, even as consumer consumption of unhealthy foods declined.
Of course, these companies may still choose to fight new food labels in the courts. In many respects, corporations are viewed as people under U.S. law and have protected rights to freedom of speech, but there are ways around that. If the F.D.A. proposes a label that relies on designs with shapes or colors to signal that a product is too caloric or unhealthy, the courts may well rule that it does not violate free speech.
And as Americans become accustomed to the idea of more aggressive labeling, the F.D.A. may be able to get more creative and slap warning labels highlighting added sugar, sodium and fat on all highly processed foods.
A 2019 study estimated that warning labels on sugary beverages alone could reduce obesity prevalence among adults in the United States by 3.1 percentage points in five years. That figure may sound insignificant, but according to the study, this would equate to more than five million fewer adults with obesity.
And in the long run, the food industry may simply choose to reformulate food products to reduce their harm without being forced — to preserve their profit margins. Processing isn’t inherently bad; take peanut butter, a product that counts as processed when it contains only peanuts and salt. (It becomes ultraprocessed when companies add ingredients like high fructose corn syrup and emulsifiers.) In Chile and other countries, warning label policies have already incentivized manufacturers to reformulate products to avoid cautionary symbols.
To be clear, this is just one of many steps toward providing all Americans with a healthy diet. But intuitive front-of-package labeling is one of the best levers available to policymakers, and it is already working elsewhere. It can work here, too.
Kat Morgan is a food systems consultant. Mark Bittman is a former Opinion columnist and the author of “How to Cook Everything,” “Animal Vegetable Junk: A History of Food, From Sustainable to Suicidal” and other books.
Graphic by Taylor Maggiacomo. Product photographs via Santa Isabel, Farmacias Medicity and Try the World.
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