The Nutrition Facts label, the black-and-white information box found on nearly every packaged food product in the United States since 1994, has recently become a symbol of consumer transparency.
From Apple’s “Privacy Nutrition Labels” that explain how smartphone apps process user data to a “Garment Facts” label that standardizes ethical disclosures on clothing, policy advocates across industries are touting “Nutrition Facts” as a model for empowering consumers and enabling socially responsible markets. They argue that intuitive information fixes could solve a wide range of market-driven social problems.
But this familiar, everyday product label actually has a complicated legacy.
I have studied food regulation and diet culture and became interested in the Nutrition Facts label while researching the history of the Food and Drug Administration’s policies on food standards and labeling. In 1990, Congress passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, which required nutrition labels on all packaged foods to address growing concerns about the increasing rates of chronic disease associated with unhealthy diets. In 1993, the FDA introduced the “Nutrition Facts” panel as a public health tool to help consumers make healthier choices.
The most obvious purpose of the Nutrition Facts label is to inform consumers about the nutritional facts of a food. In practice, however, the label has done much more than simply inform shoppers. It has also codified a wide range of political and technical compromises about how to transform food into nutrients that meet the diverse needs of the American people.
Where do “% Daily Values” come from?
The daily value or DV percentages on the label do not all come from the same source. This is a reflection of the different public health goals for the label.
Recommended values for micronutrients such as vitamins are based on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Recommended Dietary Allowances, or RDAs. Vitamin RDAs were developed out of historical concerns about inadequate nutrition and meeting minimum requirements.
The percentage daily values for macronutrients — carbohydrates, fats, and proteins — are based on the U.S. Department of Agriculture Dietary Guidelines. The DVs for macronutrients have noted a new concern about overeating and a focus on “negative eating,” which encourages maximum intake levels.
DVs reflect two fundamentally different causes of concern. For micronutrients, the numbers represent a floor: the basic minimum vitamin needs a child must meet to avoid malnutrition. For macronutrients, on the other hand, the numbers are a ceiling: the target maximum limit that adults should avoid exceeding if they want to prevent future health problems from eating too many high-sodium or high-fat foods.
Why 2,000 calories?
The FDA used a baseline of approximately 2,350 calories to calculate daily values because that is the recommended population-adjusted average caloric needs for Americans ages four and older. However, the FDA settled on 2,000 calories over objections from health groups who were concerned that the higher baseline would encourage overconsumption.
FDA officials believe that figure is less likely to be “misinterpreted as an individual target because a round number has less implied specificity.” This means that 2,000 calories is not actually a target for most American consumers who read the label. Instead, it is an example of a public health concern about collective risk, which one scientist called “treating sick populations, not sick individuals.”
By choosing a round number that was mathematically easy and a calorie count below the average American, FDA officials were opting for practicality and utility over accuracy and objectivity. They reasoned that advocating a lower baseline of 2,000 calories would offset Americans’ tendency to overeat and do more good than harm to the population at large.
Who determines portion sizes?
According to the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, serving sizes must reflect “amounts customarily used.”
In practice, this involves routine negotiations between the FDA, the USDA (which also sets portion sizes for dietary guide tools like MyPlate), and food manufacturers, each conducting research on consumer expectations and food consumption data, taking into account how the food is prepared and “typically eaten.”
Serving sizes are also determined by the product packaging. For example, a can of soda is generally considered a single-serving container and therefore only counts as one serving, regardless of how many ounces of liquid it contains.
Changing public health goals have shaped the Nutrition Facts label over time. In the 1970s, the FDA framed itself as a neutral information broker. The “war on heart disease” in the 1980s emphasized saturated fat and cholesterol. And in the 2010s, there was an increased focus on added sugars, “good fats,” and total calories.
Xaq Frohlich
What’s the point of a name?
The label was almost called “Nutrition Values” or “Dietary Guidelines” to emphasize that the Daily Values were recommendations. Then FDA Associate Commissioner Mike Taylor suggested “Nutrition Facts” to appear more legally neutral and scientifically objective.
The new design (black Helvetica font on a white background, with indented subgroups and thin lines for readability) and the authoritative boldface title helped establish “Nutrition Facts” as an easily recognized government brand.
This led to imitators in other policy areas: first “Drug Information” for over-the-counter drugs, then consumer protection initiatives in various technology sectors, such as the Federal Communications Commission’s “Broadband Information” and “AI Nutrition Information.”
The Nutrition Facts panel has remained largely consistent since the 1990s, despite some updates, such as adding lines for trans fats in 2002 and added sugars in 2016 to reflect changing public health priorities.
New ways to calculate facts
The creation of the Nutrition Facts label required the creation of an entirely new technical infrastructure for nutrition information. Transforming the diverse American diet into a consistent set of standard nutrients required new measurements, testing procedures, and standard references.
A key player in developing this technical infrastructure was the Association of Official Analytical Chemists. In the early 1990s, an AOAC Task Force developed a food triangle matrix that categorized foods based on their carbohydrate, fat, and protein content. The goal was to determine appropriate ways to measure nutritional properties, such as calories or sugar, since the physical properties of foods will affect how well each test works.
The legacy of the Nutrition Facts label
Today, public-private partnerships have taken the plug-and-play translation of nutrition facts into simplified nutritional profiles for these foods even further. USDA FoodData Central provides a comprehensive database of nutritional profiles for individual ingredients that manufacturers use to calculate Nutrition Facts for new packaged foods. This database also supports many dietary and nutrition applications.
The analytical tools developed for the Nutrition Facts label helped create the foundational information infrastructure for today’s digital diet platforms. But critics argue that these databases promote an overly reductionist view of food as simply the sum of its nutrients and ignore how the different forms a food takes—such as moisture, fibrous materials, or porous structures—impact how the body metabolizes its nutrients.
Indeed, many nutrition researchers concerned about the adverse health effects of ultraprocessed foods now talk about a food matrix to emphasize the exact opposite of what the AOAC seeks with the food triangle: the need for a holistic understanding of how food shapes health.
Surprisingly, the biggest impact of the Nutrition Facts label may have been to prompt the food industry to reformulate products to achieve appealing nutrient profiles, even when consumers don’t read labels closely. Although envisioned as an educational tool, I believe in practice the Nutrition Facts label has functioned more like a market infrastructure, reshaping the food supply to meet changing dietary trends and public health goals long before consumers find those foods in the supermarket.
This article was originally published on The Conversation by Xaq Frohlich of Auburn University. Read the original article here.