Food manufacturers spend millions of dollars every yeardesigning packages that show off their products, but upcoming actionin Congress and the Food and Drug Administration may have food makersprotecting their packaging backsides like never before.
That's because at the same time consumer interest is at anall-time high, health groups, Congress and the FDA are all workingtoward the equivalent of "full-disclosure" product and nutritionallabeling.
Under some proposals, the new labels would, for the first time,require food packagers to tell consumers how much cholesterol,saturated fat and high fiber is in the food they buy, and explainwhat those numbers mean.
More significantly, the proposed legislation that is getting themost support from public interest groups would prevent foodmanufacturers from making health claims for some product ingredientsif that benefit is offset by another food risk contained in the sameproduct.
"What we're saying is, if you sell a croissant that is high in fatbut is all wheat, you shouldn't be able to advertise it as`high-fiber,' " says Ellen Haas, executive director of theWashington, D.C.-based Public Voice for Food and Health Policy.
But confusion reigns at the moment. Just what is "lite" andwhat is not, and what constitutes buzzwords like "cholesterol-free"?Those are among the issues in similarly worded bills sponsored in theSenate by Howard M. Metzenbaum (D-Ohio) and in the House by HenryA. Waxman (D-Calif.).
It is the first time in 16 years since there have been proposalsto make a major change in packaging laws.
"For far too long we Americans have been shopping in the dark,"Metzenbaum said in proposing his so-called Nutrition Labeling andEducation Act, earlier this month. Further hearings are scheduledthis fall.
The Metzenbaum/Waxman bill would make nutritional labelingmandatory on all processed packaged foods (exempting most meats andfruit, for example) and use recommendations from the National Academyof Sciences to improve the format of labels so they would givecomparative information about nutritional value.
In one model ingredients list - not one that necessarily wouldbe adopted - the amount of fat, sodium, cholesterol and fiber in aproduct is graded as low, medium or high.
The surgeon general's report on nutrition and health issued inMarch, and an earlier report from the FDA's parent agency, Health andHuman Services, each call for diets lower in fat, salt, sugar andrecommend adequate starches and fibers. And those reports, alongwith others, have helped cause the labeling issue to blossom into animportant public policy debate.
Another bill, sponsored by Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), is far lessexact but has some support among food manufacturers, mainly becausethe Hatch proposal prohibits states from creating or policinglabeling laws and makes the FDA, not the Academy of Sciences, thecreator of informational standards.
Generally, food companies themselves are not commenting on foodlabel reform, instead letting their trade organization handle theissue, though Campbell Soup Co., itself the object of an earlier foodlabeling complaint over its soup's sodium content, has endorsedfuller labeling requirements.
And on the heels of proposed legislation, the FDA itself hasannounced it will begin the process to create new labelingregulations and will hold public hearings on the subject, one ofwhich will almost surely be held in Chicago later this year.
Health and Human Services Secretary Louis W. Sullivan promised"sweeping changes" last month, and the FDA acknowledges that despitesome efforts, there is no comprehensive labeling requirement fornutritional information that is adequate.
The FDA also promised to look at other related issues, includingthe "invention" of food names. Fish marketers, for example, havebegun selling something called "snow cod" that is actually dogfish, a shark fish that is sometimesharvested to be made into fertilizer.
Also on the FDA's promised hit-list are "natural" or "organic,""low calorie" and "low fat."
The food industry is taking a cautious approach. "We're in favorof food label reform, but we're not ready to get into specifics aboutwhat kind of information should be included," said Ellen Morton, aspokeswoman for the National Food Processors Association, a tradegroup that represents such mega-producers as Sara Lee, Quaker Oats,Beatrice and Kraft located in the Chicago area.
But specifics is what the Metzenbaum-Waxman bill is all about,and at least a dozen health groups, including the American CancerSociety, American Heart Association, the American DieteticAssociation and the American College of Physicians, have thrown theirsupport behind it.
To be sure, improving nutritional information is a bandwagonthat is gaining some powerful horsepower.
According to a new survey from the Lempert Report, a NewJersey-based poll ing organization, 54 percent of consumers "always" look atnutritional information on food packaging, and 37 percent "often" do.
Surveys like that haven't been lost on food companies, whichfor the last several years have discovered, and sometimes created,health consciousness among consumers.
Quaker Oats has seen sales of its oat-based cereals skyrocket inthe last two years, mainly by touting the cholesterol-loweringproperties found in oat bran and other oat products. Quaker carriessome health-related claims on packages of Quaker Oat Bran, and thoseclaims are, in fact, a new nutritional wrinkle in packaging thatwould probably get a new review under a new law.
Quaker, for its part, says it researches its claims carefully,and in June, the Federal Trade Commission ruled those claims did notoverstate the health benefits of Quaker's oat products.
But getting information at all seems the larger problem.Another survey this year by the Food Marketing Institute revealed 96percent of consumers view nutrition as an important element in theirfood purchases, but nearly half said the information they weregetting on packages wasn't telling them what they needed to know.
There already is an intricate set of standards and FDAregulations covering food product information.
Since 1973, food companies have had to list ingredients on theirpackaging, listing the most dominant ingredient first and the leastdominant last. In addition, foods that made nutritional claims orwere fortified with vitamins have been required to give more specificnutritional information. Otherwise, any nutritional information isvoluntary.
And, says the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Science in thePublic Interest, only half of the food sold in groceries in thiscountry carries nutritional information of any kind.
Charles Mitchell, staff attorney for the organization, charges,"Even the half that do have labeling don't explain the level ofcholesterol or saturated fats, or starches or sugars. We know thenumber of people who pay attention to nutritional labeling hasproliferated in the last few years. The problem today is food labelsdon't give them the information they need to use the knowledge theyhave."
Moreover, Mitchell says, the FDA hasn't set standards for use ofwords and phrases such as "lite," "made with vegetable shortening" oreven "no cholesterol."
He says, "Many products that say they have `no cholesterol' aremaking an absurd claim because there's no animal content in theproduct they're making. You wouldn't expect there to becholesterol."
Chicago-based Sara Lee makes "Light Classics," a cheesecake itadvertises has "only 200 calories per serving." But except for thetexture, which is lighter than Sara Lee's normal cake, "LightClassics" is not Light - as in lower in calories. Its only claim tonutritional "lightness" is that its individual slices are smaller,and therefore less caloric.
At issue, too, is the kind of nutritional information that isprovided on food packages. Haas argues, "In the '70s, when somenutritional information began appearing, consumers thought ifsomething had `100 percent of the RDA (recommended dailyallowances),' well, that looked like a healthy product.
"But we've learned a lot in the last 15 years. The emphasis haschanged from relating diet to health. The micro-nutrients shown inthose RDAs don't mean as much as the macro-nutrients, like saturatedoils, sodium and cholesterol."
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