In the final days of the Biden administration, the Food and Drug Administration proposed a front-of-package food label that is eye-catching and informative and would help consumers make better decisions about what they eat. The Trump administration should embrace it as an opening salvo for its “Make America Healthy Again” initiative to reduce obesity, diabetes and other chronic diseases.
The proposed label has been a long time in the making. More than 25 years ago, Congress directed federal agencies, including the FDA and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, to study better ways to inform consumers than the existing nutrition facts label, which lists so many ingredients and numbers that users have trouble making sense of it all.
As Christina Roberto, a health policy professor at the University of Pennsylvania, told me, traditional labeling allows companies to highlight positive features on the front of their packaging while ignoring the bad ones. So labels on cereals such as Cookie Crisp could tout its fiber content while its excessive sugar content is hidden in the fine print.
Roberto applauded the FDA’s proposal, which would require food and beverage products to have an additional label on the front. This has the same black-and-white look as the nutrition facts label but would be much simpler and more direct: It shows how much one serving contributes to daily recommended amounts of sodium, added sugar and saturated fat and, crucially, it rates whether the product has low, medium or high levels of each.