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By Teresa Green, Linda Golodner Food Safety & Nutrition Fellow<\/strong> Anyone who has ever been to the grocery store knows how overwhelming picking a product can be.\u00a0 When there are 20 brands of peanut butter it can be difficult to choose which one to purchase.\u00a0 Should you pick the one with less fat but more sugar?\u00a0 What about the claims that one brand is \u201call natural?\u201d\u00a0 How much sodium is too much?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n This understandable confusion has given rise to a proliferation of front of package (FOP) labeling systems which ostensibly present more concise information to consumers.\u00a0 Unfortunately, because these systems are designed and implemented by the industry, they can often still be confusing. This is why we have, for many years, been urging the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to adopt a mandatory FOP labeling system.\u00a0 In 2011, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) issued\u00a0a report<\/a>\u00a0on the topic, recommending a system that granted foods stars based on the amounts of fat, sugar and salt they contained.\u00a0 As of yet, FDA has taken no public action to implement this system.\u00a0 Chronically underfunded, the agency has been overwhelmed by an expanded food safety mandate in recent years and has had to prioritize those responsibilities over labeling. The UK, on the other hand, is making inroads, having just recently introduced\u00a0a system<\/a>. \u00a0However, they do not mandate its use and thus estimate the voluntary regime will cover 60 percent of foods.\u00a0 Still, this is certainly a step in the right direction.\u00a0 A single uniform, government-issued system provides clarity and consumer demand can pressure non-compliant companies into implementing the system.\u00a0 Here\u2019s to hoping FDA takes note and moves forward with its own long-delayed regulations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Teresa Green, Linda Golodner Food Safety & Nutrition Fellow Anyone who has ever been to the grocery store knows how overwhelming picking a product can be.\u00a0 When there are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2479"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2479"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20085,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2479\/revisions\/20085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nclnet.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}