The Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton reports that Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Margaret A. Hamburg wants to make the “nutrition facts” box on food products more informative. And she wants to set national standards for nutrition labels so you can’t put a sticker on top of cereal or cookie boxes saying “This is really healthy!” when, in fact, it’s not really healthy.

All of this is part of FDA’s initial forays into actual food policing after eight years of lax enforcement in the Bush administration. One thing I’d like to see Hamburg do is also start a movement to put nutrition facts on non-boxed products from produce at a grocery store to meals at restaurants. There are some practical problems to making this work completely: it’s not a great use of government resources to patrol every local produce store or tacqueria, making sure they have informative nutrition facts. But it seems unbalanced to focus solely on the processed foods that already provide a level of nutrition information.

Comment RSS - You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.