Fri, Apr-12-24, 07:33
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Senior Member
Posts: 2,013
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Plan: Atkins-ish (hypoglycemia)
Stats: 000/000/000
BF:
Progress: 50%
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Quote:
The FDA launched a multi-million dollar PR blitz to introduce the nutrition label. It included TV ads featuring celebrities — like baseball star Roger Clemens and children’s favorite animated monkey, Curious George — educational materials distributed nationwide to schools and doctor’s offices, and appearances on TV talk shows by the FDA's leadership. They touted the label’s ability to help Americans make healthier choices, live longer and better lives, and thereby lower health-care costs.
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And how has that worked out?
Quote:
The label seemed to be a perfect solution. It enabled policymakers to nudge consumers and businesses toward achieving goals instead of enacting what legal scholar Cass Sunstein — a fan of this new approach — labeled rigid “command and control” measures. The public and media lauded its simplicity and clarity, and food makers scrambled to reformulate products to improve nutrient profiles.
Yet over the last 30 years, America’s public health crisis has only deepened as obesity, heart disease, and other diet-linked illnesses have continued rising unchecked. While well-intentioned, the Nutrition Facts label proved no panacea.
One issue was a resurgence of commercial messaging that distorted nutrition facts through clever marketing. As the public education campaign tied to the new label came to an end, promotional health claims from food companies about nutrition information filled the void, easily eclipsing public health messages. The clearest example of this was front-of-package labeling manufacturers and retailers developed to highlight specific nutrient facts for a product, often taking them out of context to make a food look healthier than it was.
Plagued by common biases — most notably the tendency to keep purchasing the same food product unaware that it has changed or become less healthy — consumers also struggled to interpret labels holistically to create a balanced diet amid a sea of information. Moreover, framing dietary health as an individualized “choice” ignored deeper barriers to healthy eating like “food deserts” where getting fresh fruits and vegetables was impossible or the constraints poverty placed on people’s food choices. For all its design prowess, Nutrition Facts embraced an ideology of consumer empowerment ill-equipped to address systemic disadvantages.
Ultimately, the label’s greatest impact may have been catalyzing food companies to reduce unhealthy nutrients, like saturated fats and sodium, and boost healthier ones, like fiber and protein, spurred by consumer scrutiny. But this had little to do with the knowledge deficit the label was invented to solve, and often manufacturers simply replaced one unhealthy ingredient with another.
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Those 2 sections say a lot.
The nutrition facts are based on the premise that less fat, less saturated fat, less cholesterol, less sodium and more fiber are the epitome of a good diet.
And yet, it's only worsened public health. You'd think that would set off a  moment when they realized something is seriously wrong here.
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