FDA To Require ‘Added Sugar’ To Nutritional Fact Labels Starting 2018

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) will be making another key change as it continues to look out for public health awareness with plans to update the usual nutritional facts label found on consumer items. An ‘added sugar’ entry will be included in nutritional facts starting 2018, something that should raise awareness and affect consumer buying behavior.

For people looking out for their health, sugar has been known to be a crucial part of diets and products one can get off the shelf. Starting 2018, products will reveal actual sugar content outside the traditional total sugar that packaged foods carry.

A new entry to be known as ‘added sugar’ will be on the nutritional facts label where an assigned percent daily value to added sugars will be made known to buyers. The policy change was announced earlier this month which is seen as a big win for health groups as far as the proper nutritional value that one would ingest from the packaged food they buy.

The row concerning sugar follows a previous move tied up to artificial trans fats. Initially considered as healthier over saturated fats, trans fats would later be deemed dangerous following findings of a Dutch study in 1990.

The study found that partially hydrogenated soybean oil raised LDL cholesterol (the bad kind) and lowered HDL (the good kind).

With the new attention on sugar, something similar may potentially happen.

"Information like this on the nutrition facts label begins driving consumer behavior, and that in turn drives the industry," said Jim O'Hara, director of health promotion policy at Center for Science in the Public Interest.

With that in mind, it will be interesting what recourse companies will undertake to actually trim down the sugar component in products. There is a chance that they will try to look for some alternative ingredient to offset it like palm oil or even some genetically modified soy beans.

But while that is an option, ingredients like palm oil carry something controversial that mostly covers the environmental scene. Artificial sweeteners are another but even they carry some a lot of unanswered issues.

The bottom line here is that the US Food Industry is gearing up for a campaign at reducing sugar in products. With that said, it will be now up to companies to try and look for a remedy – a task that seems easier said than done while retaining the actual product value.