FDA Wants To Know What You Consider A 'Healthy' Food Product

What do you consider a healthy food product? As a nutritionist, what comes to my mind are whole foods such as fruits, vegetables, nuts, beans, and fish. Few people would debate such foods as being healthy and nutritious. What gets tricky is how the definition pertains to many foods with package labels that are allowed to make claims such as "healthy," "low in fat" or "good source of." The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) announced last week that it plans to redefine what "healthy" means on packaged food labels. For decades, FDA had defined a product as "healthy" if it met certain criteria such as low-fat, low saturated fat and cholesterol, relatively low in sodium, and contained at least 10% of the daily value (DV) for vitamins A or C, calcium, iron, protein, or fiber. Certain packaged food products clearly would not qualify as "healthy." Several years ago, for example, I served as the nutrition expert for a legal case against the manufacturer of an unhealthy food product which used the "healthy" claim on its package label but its product clearly was not healthy. Dietary advice has evolved over the years and the definition of "healthy" on a package label has gotten tricky. If a food product contains mostly nuts or avocados, for example, it will not qualify as "healthy" because it will not be low in fat (even though the type of fat is healthy). Yet a fat-free chocolate pudding or a sugary cereal such as Frosted Flakes may, indeed, meet the "healthy" definition....
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news