USFDA Proposes Rule Updating Criteria for “Healthy” Nutrient Claim on Food Labels

The proposed rule reflects ‘current nutrition science and the Dietary Guidelines’ by requiring foods to contain a certain amount of food from at least one of a list of recommended food groups to be labeled ‘healthy’.  Recommended food groups include vegetables, fruits, dairy, grains, protein foods, as well as oils.  The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is concerned that including criteria for nutrients to encourage could spur fortification to allow foods that are low in saturated fat, sodium, and added sugars to qualify for the ‘healthy’ claim, despite these foods not contributing to a meaningful amount of a food group (e.g., white bread fortified with calcium).

Among others, FDA proposes limits on sodium and saturated fat (which are already included in the current criteria), along with adding a limit on added sugars (which is new).  For sodium, the proposal lowers the criteria from 480mg per ‘Reference Amounts Customarily Consumed’ (RACC) to <230mg per RACC for individual foods to be labeled healthy.  For added sugars, which have a daily value of 50g, the FDA is proposing a low baseline value of under 5% of the daily value per RACC (i.e., under 2.5g), but says it is ‘also proposing to adjust the baseline values for added sugars as warranted, based on specific considerations of the different food groups and subgroups.’

For saturated fat, the FDA proposes a baseline limit of 5% of the daily value per RACC (≤ 1g) for most foods, but 10% DV for dairy products, game meats, seafood, and eggs; and 20% of total fat for oils and oil-based spreads and dressings (which would exclude high saturated fat oils such as coconut oil from making healthy claims).  It is also ‘considering an approach using a ratio of saturated fat to total fat.  The limit on total fat has been removed.