THURSDAY, Dec. 11, 2003 (HealthDayNews) -- The nutritional information currently available on food labels is stale and desperately needs to be freshened.
That's the gist of a new Institute of Medicine report titled Dietary Reference Intakes: Guiding Principles for Nutrition Labeling and Fortification. The report, sponsored by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), the U.S. Food Safety and Inspection Service and Health Canada, offers "guiding principles" to both U.S. and Canadian officials on how to get the information up to speed.
"The idea was to see what there is in the new science that could be used to improve the information on the label so as to give better guidance to consumers," says Dr. Irwin H. Rosenberg, chairman of the committee that produced the report and dean of the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University in Boston.
Although the report won't result in any immediate, concrete changes, it will open a review-and-comment process that could lead to future changes. "It's going to lead to a revision of the daily values and possible changes in our fortification policy," says an FDA official. Fortification policy refers to the adding of nutrients to food by manufacturers.
Changes will also help the United States "harmonize values with Canada so that food manufacturers can use one nutrition label on products sold in both countries," adds the FDA official, who asked not to be identified.
According to the report, the FDA first started requiring nutrition information on food labels in 1941. Although there have been periodic updates, the current percent Daily Values (% DVs) on U.S. labels are based partially on Recommended Dietary Allowances (RDAs) from 1968. In Canada, nutrition information on labels is based on Recommended Nutrient Intakes (RNIs) from 1983. Some additional updates were undertaken in 1990. Percent Daily Value indicates what percentage of a total diet is provided by a particular product or portion of a product.
Needless to say, science has progressed dramatically in the intervening years, but the progress is not reflected in labels on pantry shelves.
Since 1997, the Institute of Medicine has been issuing nutrient reference values referred to as Dietary Reference Intakes (DRIs), which outline quantities of various nutrients people need to consume regularly to maintain good health. These DRIs replaced the RDAs in the United States and RNIs in Canada. And they form the science upon which the new labeling information will be based.
"The committee is trying to say, 'How can we use the information in the DRIs to get the daily value updated along more scientific grounds so that it can be more useful," Rosenberg says.
The appearance of the labels themselves will not change much. "The consumer would use it in much the same way but the numbers themselves would change," Rosenberg says.
The report recommends that nutrition information continue to be presented as percent of Daily Value and that the values still be based on a 2,000-calorie daily diet.
A new expression, "estimated average requirement," has been introduced. "This is a better representation of the distribution of the requirement across the population," Rosenberg says. "This is a representation of better science than we have now."
While the Dietary Reference Intakes include recommendations for 13 different stages of life, to keep things simple, the report recommends weighting the information so it applies to all healthy individuals four years of age and older. "You can't have a different number of each of those on a label, it becomes too cumbersome," Rosenberg says.
The second part of the report includes six "guiding principles" for food fortification. Currently, the United States gives food manufacturers discretion when it comes to fortifying food while Canada mandates certain types of fortification.
"This will be much more useful directly to regulatory agencies than to the consumer in deciding how to make the way in which we fortify foods in the marketplace the most effective and healthy approach," Rosenberg says.
More information
The FDA has more information on how to use a food label, as does Kansas State University.
