FDA to propose new food labels

This idiocy has screwed up people's diets and continues to. So what do we need? Naturally more of it.

Michael Pollan calls it nutritionism.

Carbs are bad for you. No wait. It's fats. No wait, we haven't nannied things up in a while. So let's put sugars into the crosshairs.

They should stop selling people on the idea that they need break down food into components (which we really don't understand!). And people should simply use common sense. That doesn't require a government agency or a nanny bureaucracy that regulates everything.

Part of the reason that people overconsume sugars in the first place is that when "fat" became the point of misplaced focus, and the marketers started producing zillions of processed foods labeled "low fat," they started loading those items with sugar to increase the taste -- so people would buy them. So voila, sugar is now the enemy. Goodbye fat. This unintended consequences thing is not limited to that, though. It is what the nutritionism leads to.

Fat isn't your problem. Neither are sugars. Eating processed food (as opposed to the whole foods that have been around for millions of years) is. It's that simple.

All that the mandated labeling does is misinform people. It is selectively pretending that food is a list of nutritional components that some authority (the FDA?) actually understands (and they don't), some of which are good and some of which are bad. So we demonize fat or sugars or other carbs. Or we make people believe that stripping out nutrients from natural whole foods to make them cheaper and give them endless shelf life, and them fortifying them with synthetic vitamins or components (what is the buzzword this week. ... Omega-3 fatty acids, antioxidants?) is the key to health.

If the FDA (which has done irreparable social harm across our food and drug landscape, and yet people don't get it) wants to do a label, how about a skull and crossbones "don't buy this" label that gets automatically slapped on the processed items that fill 95 percent of the supermarket (but didn't exist 60 years ago -- correlation perhaps?)? That actually MIGHT be of some use to someone, even if it shouldn't be the job of a government agency to demonize certain products when people have free choice.

Seriously, why do we add cost -- whatever the compliance costs are -- to people's food bills with this stupidity? It's bad enough that we have this bureaucracy nannying people when it comes to the most basic thing about living. ... but the nannying doesn't even protect anyone from anything because those food labels are ridiculous. And it just makes our lives more expensive and sucks resources out of our economy.

People don't need the FDA to tell them how to eat -- something people have been doing for millions of years with no problem. Eat an apple. Or some milk. Or some broccoli. Or some bread made from whole flour, water, yeast, salt, etc. It has worked for how many thousands of years?

Yet we seem to be plagued with diet-related social problems now. ... and what does it correlate with? This "science" of breaking down food into nutritional components, pretending that these nutritionists understand what they don't. The FDA then mandates the stuff. And marketers using that harmful misinformation to sell people cheap foods with bogus health claims -- when in reality the processed foods themselves are the problem.

In the 1970s they were steering people to transfats, margarine for example, because it was "healthier" than animal-based saturated fats. Then heart diseased took off, which of course led to them introducing the word "triglycerides" to people. ... and of course reversing course.

If it comes in a box, and it doesn't spoil the way most whole, natural foods do (what your great grandparents had to deal with) and has a list of ingredients you can't pronounce, use your head -- it ain't something that living beings have subsisted on for millions of years. You are basically turning yourself into a lab experiment (for better or worse) if you choose to eat that way. ... Buyer beware.

No matter what label the FDA mandates, with whatever pseudo science it slaps on that label, you still are throwing out millions of years of how people have survived on a chance that decades of pseudoscience has figured out a better way. Based on the evidence you see around you, is that likely?

 

The FDA is not "fully informing" anyone about anything. It is very randomly mandating things about food packaging design.

This isn't a food safety issue. It isn't about food processors putting misleading or false information on packaging -- in which case they could simply tell them to stop.

It is proactive and very random.

It is about the FDA mandating that one industry group has to put selective and random information (and not other information) of some bureaucrat's choosing (of dubious use -- my earlier point) on its labels.

Obviously, it drives up costs of products to some extent because compliance costs something (and those costs now hit all of us).

I know the knee-jerk is about how it is great -- the FDA is helping people make informed choices.

My question is, if consumers actually WANTED that random information that is now mandated (or any other random information that isn't being mandated on their labels). ... whatever stopped them from demanding it on their own to the point that it became standard for marketers to include the info on their package designs?