Post: The FDA is Changing What Foods can be Called “Healthy”

6 min read

Whole grains and fruits are in, and added sugar is out. That’s going to change what’s on a lot of cereal boxes and other things

By Reyna Gobel edited by Josh Fischman Fruit without added sugar will be classified as healthy under a new FDA rule Rubberball/Mike Kemp/Getty Images Until now, an orange couldn’t be called healthy, according to U.S. Food and Drug Administration. The fruit has 70 calories, three grams of fiber and more than 100 percent of the recommended daily value for vitamin C. Yet the whole fruit can’t qualify for a “healthy” label based on existing FDA guidelines for use of the term. Water can’t do so either—along with pistachios, bananas and many other fresh foods.

But what’s labelled “healthy” is about to change. A revised FDA rule , just announced this month, would allow whole foods such as oranges, in addition to fish such as salmon, to qualify as healthy. What can no longer use the word? Foods that have higher amounts of added sugar or saturated fats than the rule allows.

This change—the first in 30 years— could stop a lot of companies that call their breakfast cereals “healthy” from using the word on the box. The agency is working on a logo symbolizing “healthy” that manufacturers can use only if they meet new standards, but that may take a while.

The old rule for using the word healthy on a food label was that the grocery item must contribute at least 10 percent of the established daily value of certain vitamins, calcium, iron, protein or fiber and not go over specific limits for saturated fat, total fat, sodium or cholesterol. The nutrients didn’t have to occur in the product naturally.

“The current rule is dangerously outdated, focusing on 1980 dietary priorities around fat and saturated fat, and so on,” says Dariush Mozaffarian , a cardiologist and director of the Food Is Medicine Institute at the Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy at Tufts University. He says the rule needed to change to focus on the FDA’s 2020–2025 Dietary Guidelines recommendations, which no longer accept adding […]

The FDA is Changing What Foods can be Called “Healthy”