US Food Industry: Long Buried Truth about Products. Is That Coming to An End? UPFs, Labels 🍕

[appalachiablue]

- The FDA is developing front-of-package labels that corporations may have to start printing as early as 2027, The Guardian, May 20, 2024. Ed.
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Ultra-processed foods are ultra bad for you. Here’s what to know

Step into a grocery store in France and you’re liable to see a green, yellow or red score on the front of most packaged foods: a green “A” for the healthiest, a red “E” for the least nutritious. Zip across the globe to Chile, and that traffic light-like label becomes a stop sign, warning consumers when food contains a high amount of sugar, salt, saturated fats or calories.

Today, more than a dozen countries require that companies print nutritional labels on the front of food packages – a move that’s come as the rate of diet-related diseases, like hypertension, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, stroke and obesity, increases worldwide. So far, the US does not require any front-of-package nutrition labels. But that could soon change. The US Food and Drug Administration is currently developing front-of-package labels that it could require corporations to begin printing as early as 2027.

Despite significant opposition from food companies, many of which are drawing on big tobacco’s playbook, the FDA is evaluating different mandatory label designs to determine which is most effective at informing consumers, but also which is legal under US corporate free speech laws. As emerging research identifies a wide range of health impacts linked to the consumption of ultra-processed food, conversations about nutritional labels are growing more urgent.

To date, the labels under consideration by the FDA (and implemented in other countries) mark only “nutrients of concern”, like sugar and sodium – not-ultra processed foods.

But many advocates say that should change. UPFs are industrially formulated products made out of substances extracted from foods, like sugars, salts, hydrogenated fats, bulking agents and starches (sugary breakfast cereals, microwave dinners, soft drinks, packaged snacks). Today, UPFs make up 73% of the US food supply and provide the average US adult with more than 60% of their daily calories.
But research is increasingly linking UPFs to a whole host of health issues: from cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes to colorectal cancer and depression...Read More,

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/20/food-companies-nutrition-labels-truth

[Voltaire2]

1. Given the level of abject corruption

I predict that very little will change, and that the clown propaganda industry will immediately make these minor changes into a panic over the gummint takin our chips away. Of course any policy change will be contested in the courts, with the supreme clowns considering abolishing food regulation entirely.

[Turbineguy]

2. If trump gets in, his political hacks will bring things to the last days

of the Soviet Union.