FDA intends to redefine which foods can be labeled with "health"

This week, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) finally announced that it would revise the definition of "healthy" label on food packaging and began to solicit opinions from the public.

The FDA's current definition of “health” is also defined in 1994. The main criteria are low fat, saturated fat, sodium and cholesterol, which also contain certain nutrients such as vitamin C or calcium. This looks good, but now we think a lot of healthy foods can't be selected, such as avocado, which is considered a good source of fat, but it does have high levels of fat and does not meet the FDA's “health” label.

In May of this year, the FDA officially announced that it would change the label of food . From the comparison of old and new labels, we can see that society's attention to food is completely different. In addition to fat, consumers also want to know how much sugar and potassium are added to food. They no longer think that low-fat foods are healthy.

Douglas Balentine, director of the FDA Nutrition and Food Labeling Office, said that many consumers look at food labels when they buy something, especially when they buy a product for the first time, but many of them don't look at the ingredients and content carefully. Go to "health" and decide to buy it directly.

So for food companies, the definition of the “health” label is very important. For example, Kind, a company that produces snack bars, has previously written “healthy” labels on some of its products. Although many people now think that Kind snack bars are rich in protein and various nutrients, they still receive FDA. A warning letter asking them to remove the label . Kind subsequently expressed the hope that the FDA could modify the definition of the “health” label.

Kind Snack Bar Source: Fortune

“By updating the definition, we hope that more companies will claim that the new product is 'healthy', so that new product innovations and recipe modifications can be made to allow consumers to see a large number of 'healthy' options in the market,” Douglas Balentine said they are also planning to modify other tags, such as the definition of "nautural" tags.