Opinion: FDA’s plan to define “healthy” for food packaging: Better than the existing labeling anarchy, but do we really need it?
The FDA has announced the set of rules it proposes to enforce for manufacturers to claim that a food product is “healthy.” The proposed rules are a lot better than the labeling anarchy that currently exists. But here’s my bottom line: health claims are not about health. They are about selling food products.
The FDA says that a “healthy” product must meet two requirements: It must contain a meaningful amount of food, and it must not contain more than certain upper limits for saturated fat, sodium, and added sugars.
