Word: fda
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Just last week Kessler's FDA took aim at juice producers by proposing new regulations that would force them to disclose for the first time exactly how much and what kinds of juice are in their fruit-juice drinks. Such a rule would reveal, for instance, that Veryfine drinks contain only 10% fruit juice. It would also inform consumers that even the claims made by many cranberry and raspberry drinks to be "100% juice" are somewhat misleading: they are filled with deflavored apple or grape extracts that are little more than natural sugar water...
...with the ammunition for his consumers' crusade last fall, when it passed the Nutritional Labeling and Education Act. The law, which sailed through both houses unopposed, requires new, straightforward labels for all foods, including fresh fruits and vegetables. While the changes will not become mandatory until May 1993, the FDA has until November of this year to come up with proposals for what the new labels should say. In addition, public pressure is mounting -- from such groups as the American Association of Retired Persons, the American Heart Association and the National Parent-Teacher Association -- to revamp the labels on meat...
...hard enough to find time to go shopping without having to worry about taking along a personal computer, so the FDA is considering requiring labels that include the total number of calories as well as how many calories are derived from fat. Yet the proposed requirement could end up trading one kind of confusion for another. "We're a little concerned that the consumer won't know how to interpret this number," says Guy Johnson, nutrition director for Grand Metropolitan's food sector. "Let's say you have a product that has 30 calories from fat, which would mean roughly...
Kessler is waging a crusade well suited to the 1990s: it involves no new money. In fact, during the past decade the FDA has been given a host of new and taxing responsibilities, including the oversight of the generic-drug industry, the evaluation of hundreds of AIDS treatments and now the redesigning of food labels. Yet the agency's budget has not increased proportionally. "We've had to divert people from laboratory work, and we've brought people in from the field," says Ed Scarbrough, the chief architect of the FDA's new labeling program. He believes that the task...
...have a long history of prodding government to act when public health and dietary issues are at stake. Popular outrage over the Chicago meat- packing scandals, revealed in Upton Sinclair's 1906 classic, The Jungle, gave rise to both a meat-inspection law and the predecessor to the modern FDA. The discovery, during World War II, that many draftees suffered from beriberi and other vitamin B deficiencies led to the government's creation of the Recommended Dietary Allowances for vitamins and minerals...