Labeling laws continue to change: government agencies are striving to make food, beverage and drug labels safer and more concise. Here's what that means to you

Food & Drug Packaging, Jan, 2005 by Joanna Cosgrove

Last year food, beverage and drug labels were impacted by a variety of regulatory changes as various agencies worked to provide more and better information to consumers and health care professionals.

Over the past 12 months, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has used the full range of its enforcement tools to get the most "bang for the buck" in terms of protecting the public health.

In 2004, you saw updates to the Nutrition Facts box, newly approved health claims, the introduction of a voluntary Alcohol Facts box and a looming deadline for adding Drug Facts. Pop quiz: After all the see-sawing, what's the latest word on mandatory country-of-origin labeling?

Here's a concise review of major labeling law changes in 2004 that will affect you in 2005 and beyond.

Nutrition Facts overhaul

One of the biggest issues to influence food labeling in 2004 was the ongoing quest to curb obesity. Redefined by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) as a national epidemic, rising obesity rates and mounting evidence linking obesity to conditions such as diabetes, heart disease and death prompted the agency to heighten its efforts to better educate the public on the basics of healthy nutrition. FDA acted to put the onus on food companies to be more specific with their nutrition labels.

Several recommendations came as a result of FDA's Obesity Working Group report, the final version of which was issued this past March. The Group's long- and short-term proposals are based on the scientific fact that weight control is mainly a function of caloric balance.

Two of the label-centric aspects of the findings involve stepping up enforcement actions concerning accuracy of food labels and enhancing the food label to display calorie count more prominently--and to use meaningful serving sizes.

An FDA official interviewed for this article comments on the latter finding, saying "One of the primary recommendations is for food and beverage manufacturers to take advantage of the flexibility within the current law, by labeling the caloric intake for a food that could be consumed in one sitting occasion as a single serving. For example, a 20-ounce carbonated beverage would contain 2.5, eight-ounce serving sizes. Rather than listing the nutritional data for each of the 2.5 servings, the beverage manufacturer could instead list the total caloric value for a single serving of 20 ounces."

The increased label reading sophistication of consumers has also prompted FDA to demand the disclosure of trans fat and saturated fat on all processed food labels. Although FDA's trans fat label ruling isn't scheduled to take effect until Jan. 1, 2006, several companies--Unilever Bestfoods and Tyson, among them--are already eliminating it from their goods and replacing it with more healthful oils to attract a wider array of health-focused consumers (see "Bestfoods, Tyson tout no trans fat on labels" from Food & Drug Packaging, April 2004).

The carbohydrate conundrum

Mid-way through 2004, news broke that the Low Carb diet movement had peaked. Although the popularity of Atkins and similar low-carb lifestyles has continued to wane, there continues to be a myriad of low carb products making their way to store shelves.

In March, FDA took steps to homogenize the verbiage used to describe a food or beverage's carbohydrate quantity. "The simplest, most direct phrase, 'low carb' for example is not allowed on food labels," explains Karen Duester, president of Food Consulting Co., a company that specializes in the preparation of regulation-compliant food label components for the food industry.

FDA regulations for nutrient content claims (21CFR101.13) permit labels to describe the level of certain nutrients in a product using the term low, but FDA has not established values for carbohydrate in relation to claims; therefore, the term "low" cannot be used in association with the term carbohydrate or "carb" on food labels.

Referring to the FDA regulations, Duester says the terms "free," "zero," "no," "without," "trivial source of," "negligible source of," "dietarily insignificant source of," "low," "little," "few," "contains a small amount of," "low source of," "reduced," "less," "lower," "fewer," and any synonyms of these words are disallowed to describe carbohydrate content on food labels. However, food labelers may make an accurate quantitative statement of fact (such as, 5g carbohydrate per serving), as long as the statement does not characterize the amount of carbohydrate present. A statement such as "only 5g carbs" for example, is not allowed since the word "only" characterizes the level of carbohydrate as low.

Duester further explained that FDA regulations do not disallow the terms "net carbs," "net impact carbs" or "net effective carbs" to describe carbohydrate content on food labels. These terms are being used by the food industry to reflect the amount of carbohydrate a product contains that will impact blood glucose levels. The value is derived from the formula, net carbs = total carbohydrates - dietary fiber - sugar alcohols.