Some prominent cereal manufacturers have threatened legal action if FDA goes through with its proposed criteria for when foods can be labeled with the nutrient content claim “healthy” on their packaging.
General Mills, Kellogg, and Post Holdings are among those arguing that FDA’s changes, if enacted, would exclude more than 95% of the major ready-to-eat cereals from being labeled “healthy.”
FDA announced last fall that it was looking to reclassify “healthy” and update existing rules, which are almost three decades old.
The proposed rule would allow the “healthy” designation for what the agency calls “nutrient-dense foods”; foods that contain a certain percentage of fruit, vegetables, grains, dairy, or protein. In doing so, it would limit cereals labelled as “healthy” to those with no more than 2.5 grams of sugar per serving.
These cereal manufacturers argue that ready-to-eat cereal is “an affordable, accessible, convenient, and popular nutrient-dense food that has a long history of helping consumers build healthy dietary patterns” and, therefore, should continue to be able to make the “healthy” claim.
In a filing to the FDA, the companies asked for FDA to reevaluate the framework, claiming its current solution as written would be open to legal challenge in that it violates the First Amendment by prohibiting truthful, non-misleading claims in an unjustified manner and also exceeds FDA’s statutory authority in several ways. “The proposed rule precludes many objectively healthy products, including those promoted by the Dietary Guidelines, from engaging in truthful, non-misleading commercial expression, and these overly restrictive boundaries for ‘healthy’ violate the First Amendment,” the letter said. “Furthermore, ready-to-eat cereal is recognized for its value and nutritional benefits in federal feeding programs that reach more than 20 million participants who are nutritionally at risk.”
It’s not just cereal companies fighting the proposed changes. Numerous manufacturers that produce everything from snacks to baked goods to pastas to frozen pizzas are also challenging the rules. The Consumer Brands Association, which represents approximately 1,700 major food brands, sent a 54-page comment to FDA objecting to the proposed rule. “We are particularly concerned by the overly stringent proposed added sugars thresholds,” the group said in the letter. “We appreciate FDA’s interest in assessing added sugars intake. We believe, however, that FDA’s restrictive approach to added sugars content in foods described as healthy is unwarranted and outside FDA’s authority given the lack of scientific consensus on the relationship between sugar intake and diet-related disease.”
The agency is expected to make a final decision on the changes later this year.
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