If the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has its way, food companies would soon have to disclose the amount of added sugar on product labels as a percentage of Americans’ recommended calorie intake. The amount, also known as the percent daily value, would be based on the federal government’s recommendation that daily sugar intake shouldn’t exceed 10 percent.
The proposal, which the agency announced on Friday, goes a step further than its initial call to include information about added sugars on updated Nutrition Facts labels. Sugar content is currently given in grams. But if lawmakers approve the recommendations, added sugars would be expressed with percent daily value denotation — just like total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, sodium, total carbohydrates, dietary fiber, calcium, and iron.
Food producers mix added sugars to food and beverages during the production process. Products like fruit and soft drinks, candy, cakes, cookies, and pies commonly include added sugars. Proponents of the FDA’s latest recommendation argue that added sugars increase calorie count but have no nutritional value, prompting the need to include its measurement on nutrition labels so that consumers can have more control of their diet. They also say that expressing this information as a percentage will help.
“The percent daily value shows how much a nutrient in a food contributes to a daily diet and would help consumers make informed choices for themselves and their families,” the FDA said in a statement. “The FDA is also proposing to change the current footnote on the Nutrition Facts label to help consumers understand the percent daily value concept. In addition, the FDA is releasing results of its consumer studies on the declaration of added sugars and the footnote.”
The American Heart Association (AHA) ties added sugars to obesity and depleted heart health. On its website, AHA recommends limiting the amount of added sugar to no more than half of one’s discretionary calorie intake — no more than 100 calories and 150 calories per day for women and men, respectively. The organization stresses that consumers trying to cut down their sugar consumption have to look beyond current nutrition labels and decipher which chemical compounds are, in fact, added sugars. Those ingredients usually end with the suffix “–ose”.
Currently, nearly 600,000 food items in the United States contain added sugars — including sucrose and high fructose corn syrup. Experts tie the explosion of added sugar to the release of the first dietary guidelines in the late 1970s that discouraged consumption of fats. Since then, added sugar intake among Americans increased by more than 35 percent before falling after 2008, when consumption of sweetened beverages fell.
The push to update labeling counts among a bevy of efforts by the FDA to hold food producers accountable to consumers, a growing number of whom are becoming health conscious. A 2014 study conducted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture found that the number of people who use nutrition labels on shopping trips increased up to nearly 42 percent for working-age adults and 57 percent of older adults. The study also showed that three-fourths of all adults said they would use similar information in restaurants.
In recent years, scientists have spoken out about the lack of regulations that enable brands to embellish their products’ nutritional value, even going as far as labeling food as “natural” although that may not be the case. The sugar industry has also been scrutinized for its manipulation of scientific research about sugar’s health drawbacks and interference in attempts to draw up consumption guidelines. To some, the FDA’s latest action signals a changing of the tide.
But updating nutrition labels may not suffice, as FDA leaders recently acknowledged. A 2013 agency study showed that a significant number of Americans can’t interpret labels, especially when they’re calculating larger serving sizes. Susan Mayne, director of the Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition at the FDA, recently told reporters that agency leaders would like to collaborate with other federal offices to educate consumers about differences between added sugar and total sugar.
“Currently, there is no good way to decipher between added sugars and naturally existing types, such as what’s found in dairy and fruit,” Dana Angelo White, an assistant clinical professor of athletic training and sports medicine at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, CT, recently told reporters. “These natural sugars have much more to offer in the nutrition department compared to highly processed and refined sweeteners.”