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Little Evidence Supports the FDA’s Proposed Food Label Rules
From Matthew Feeney of Cato.
"In the upcoming issue of Regulation
magazine, Robert Scharff, associate professor in the Department of
Consumer Sciences at the Ohio State University, and Sherzod Abdukadirov,
research fellow in the Regulatory Studies Program at the Mercatus
Center at George Mason University, argue that the FDA’s two proposed
rules on food nutrition labeling are supported by little evidence and
should be scrapped.
The food labeling rule would, as Scharff and Abdukadirov explain,
result in a number of changes “involving both formatting and content
changes to labels, increases in recordkeeping, and new analytic
requirements.” The second rule, the serving size rule, would affect
packages that contain a small number of servings.
The FDA claims that implementing both of these rules will help
Americans make healthier food choices. However, as Scharff and
Abdukadirov point out, the FDA does not cite any work that supports the
underlying assumption that consumers will change their short-sighted
behavior if changes are made to food labels. In fact, an
FDA-commissioned study found that increasing the font size for calorie
information on food labels had no effect on consumer behavior. In
addition, the FDA has provided little evidence that inserting a separate
line on labels for “added sugars” will result in health benefits.
Aside from the lack of evidence cited by the FDA, Scharff and
Abdukadirov explain that the study on the effects of regulations written
to comply with the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, which
is used by the FDA to make the benefits calculations of its proposed
rules, is flawed. Not only is the study unpublished and yet to be peer
reviewed, its sample is limited to women aged between 19 and 50 years
old, which artificially inflates the effects of nutrition labels on
behavior because women are more likely to view nutrition panels than
men.
If the two proposed rules are implemented they will add billions of
dollars in costs for consumers. Such an expensive change in regulations
should have to be justified with good empirical data. Scharff and
Abdukadirov show that the FDA’s proposed rules are justified mostly by
good intentions, not data."
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