U.S. battles effort to list percentages of food ingredients
By Cindy Skrzycki
Washington Post
Good things come in packages that spell out exactly how frosted those flakes are and how many veggies are in that vegetable soup. That's the message consumer advocates are promoting in a push for an international standard for labels that would list exactly how much, in percent, of certain ingredients is in packaged food products.
Not so fast, say the food industry and the Bush administration. The current U.S. system, which requires listing ingredients in descending order by weight, is just fine. Plus, nutrition labeling tells consumers how much sodium, cholesterol, fats and sugars are in a product. Anything more, they argue, could be tampering with "proprietary" recipes.
The issue is to be considered at a July meeting in Rome of the Codex Alimentarius Commission, an international food standard-setting group composed of more than 160 countries. If it eventually approves a percentage labeling standard, U.S. companies don't have to follow it. But those with global trade would have to comply in countries that adopt the standard. And many countries, particularly developing countries with growing markets, adopt Codex standards because they lack the resources to set food safety and nutrition rules themselves.
The European Union has required disclosure by percent of the "characterizing" or main ingredient in a product since 2000.
This idea has been around in this country since the late 1970s when the Food and Drug Administration, Agriculture Department and Federal Trade Commission looked at whether they had authority to propose percentage ingredient labeling. But the initiative died in the Reagan administration.
The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit advocacy group, petitioned the FDA in 1997 to consider percentage ingredient labeling for all packaged goods, but it never got a definitive answer from the agency. The International Association of Consumer Food Organizations, which is led by CSPI, has lobbied percentage labeling since 2000 in the world forum.
Armed with a new report it compiled on the effects of percentage labeling and labels from other countries, CSPI, and a consumer group in Japan and Britain, stressed to Codex that such disclosure helps consumers make better nutritional decisions, buy the highest-quality product, comparison shop, and avoid inferior products. The report said such labeling creates competition among companies to produce higher-quality products.
"We have had ingredient labeling in order of predominance since the 1930s," said Bruce Silverglade, CSPI's legal affairs director. "The listing doesn't give consumers the information they need to make an informed decision."
For example, he said, if it's sugar a person is concerned about, wouldn't it be essential to know exactly how much of a sugared cereal is sugar?
Take Kellogg's "Frosties," a popular cereal sold in Thailand. The label says the product is 39 percent added sugars.
The U.S. version of the same product just says a serving has 12 grams of sugar, Silverglade said.
Regulators at the FDA, who are part of the U.S. delegation to Codex, oppose percentage ingredient labeling and will take their complaints to Rome. One is contention over the threshold amount of ingredient that would trigger listing.
They argue that listing ingredients by the percentage amount is tantamount to printing the proprietary recipe of the product for the world to see.
