Be Warned: A Proposal to Reform Food Product Disclosure Statements
By Gideon Zvi Palte, J.D. ’18[*]
I. Introduction
Dietary choices can have a significant effect on health.[1] Moderate reduction in salt consumption can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke, and coronary heart attack.[2] High cholesterol has been identified as a major contributor to coronary heart disease, heart attacks, and strokes.[3] Reducing fat intake can contribute to weight loss.[4]
The societal prevalence of health conditions can have sizeable economic effects. The World Health Organization has identified a push to reduce salt intake as one of the most cost-effective population health measures that countries can implement.[5] Obesity costs the United States health care system $147 billion annually.[6]
The impact of dietary choices on health and the costs of chronic health conditions have led other countries to implement front-of-package food labeling requirements to warn consumers of high levels of specific nutrients in food products. Ecuador requires food products to display red, yellow, and green warning icons to indicate sugar, fat, and sodium contents.[7] Chile has implemented aggressive food labeling reforms to combat national obesity rates that are lower than such rates in the United States.[8]
The United States does not require comparable warnings of the risk of high contents of specific nutrients in food products. Although federal regulations identify fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium as nutrients that have the potential to increase the risk of a diet-related disease or health condition,[9] food products that contain these “health-risk nutrients”[10] in potentially dangerous quantities are not required to provide consistent or clear warning to consumers.
Food products are required to display disclosure statements to warn consumers of potentially dangerous health-risk nutrient contents only when those food products make a nutrient content claim[11] that characterizes the level of a nutrient in the food (e.g., “high in fiber”).[12] Because nutrient content claims are voluntarily included on food products,[13] food manufacturers can easily avoid the requirement to include a disclosure statement to warn of potentially dangerous health-risk nutrient contents by choosing not to display nutrient content claims on their packaging. Consumers therefore receive inconsistent notice of potentially dangerous health-risk nutrient contents in food products. Moreover, consumers do not receive clear notice of potentially dangerous health-risk nutrient contents because disclosure statements do not explicitly state that the food product poses a health risk due to its content of the health-risk nutrient.[14]
The shortcoming of the disclosure statement in providing consistent and clear notice of potentially dangerous health-risk nutrient contents in foods stems from its initial enactment alongside referral statements, which were intended to refer consumers to the Nutrition Facts label whenever a food product made a nutrient content claim.[15] The referral statement and disclosure statement requirements were enacted together as part of the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 (“NLEA”),[16] which required standardized nutrition information on food product packaging for the first time.[17] Referral statements served to remind consumers to consult the newly required comprehensive nutrition information, instead of nutrient content claims that food manufacturers voluntarily included on food packaging, to learn about the nutrient contents of foods.[18] However, this requirement was abrogated with the passage of the Food and Drug Administration Modernization Act of 1997 (“FDAMA”),[19] leaving only disclosure statements, which are required to accompany nutrient content claims when food products contain health-risk nutrients at potentially dangerous levels.[20]
This Article proposes reforming disclosure statements to provide consistent and clear notice of potentially dangerous levels of health-risk nutrients in foods. The proposal would make disclosure statements (1) mandatory irrespective of the presence or absence of nutrient content claims and (2) explicit in indicating that the food products to which they apply contain health-risk nutrients in a quantity that poses a health risk.
The Article will first review the history of the legal requirement of disclosure statements in the United States and describe the current requirement and its shortcomings. Next, the Article will explore a private sector food labeling initiative in the United States and the regulatory approaches adopted by Chile and Ecuador to warn consumers of high contents of specific nutrients in foods. It will then discuss the importance of mandatory clear and accurate food labeling in addressing diet-related diseases and facilitating informed consumer decisions. Finally, the Article will propose a statutory reformation of disclosure statements in order to give consumers consistent and clear notice of contents of health-risk nutrients in food products that pose a health risk, followed by an analysis of the constitutional permissibility of the proposal.
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