Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) is pushing the Food and Drug Administration to place warnings on unhealthy foods that alert consumers to their links to Type 2 diabetes and obesity, which would likely entail affixing large black labels to certain sodas, snacks, and desserts.
Sanders wrote to FDA Commissioner Robert Califf earlier this month in his capacity as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee to ask for the agency’s implementation of “strong front-of-package labels so that all consumers, especially children, can understand which products are harmful to their health.”
Sanders did not specify what design the labels should have, but in his letter to Califf, he supported designs similar to those in several Latin American countries that have been proposed by the Pan American Health Organization. These stop-sign-shaped labels are intended to inform consumers that certain products contain high amounts of salt, saturated fats, sugar, and calories.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that nearly 20% of children and adolescents between the ages of 2 and 19, or 14.7 million people, are medically obese. Nearly 42% of adults over age 20 are obese, with over 9% being severely obese.
Data on obesity in the United States has not been collected by the CDC since March 2020 due to the disruptions in the healthcare system from COVID-19 pandemic policy.
“The FDA can and must do more to ensure that Americans, especially children, teens and their
parents, understand the health risks associated with the consumption of these unhealthy and
ultra-processed foods,” Sanders said. “Other major countries around the world have moved forward aggressively in this area and there is no reason as to why the United States is lagging so far behind.”
Sanders cited several Latin American countries, such as Chile, Uruguay, and Peru, that use the black octagonal warning labels highlighting the high percentage of unhealthy chemicals in foods and beverages.
Academic studies from Chile’s implementation of the food labeling policy indicate that the policy greatly expedited the downward trend in purchasing unhealthy foods and the marketing of unhealthy foods to children. Researchers, however, were not fully able to disentangle the effects of the labeling policy from other healthy food policies implemented in Chile at the same time, including changes in school lunch programs.
Sanders signaled in his letter to the FDA that warning labels about the content of food and beverages may not be enough to deter consumption, citing the efficacy of warning labels on tobacco products that explicitly connect ingestion to cancer.
“Tobacco labels in the United States do not say ‘high in tar, high in nicotine, high in carcinogens.’ They say ‘cigarettes cause cancer,’” Sanders wrote.
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Sanders told Califf that the HELP Committee would be holding a hearing on the FDA’s role in the healthy foods market, hinting that Califf himself would be called to testify before the panel.
“The HELP Committee will be holding a hearing in the near future to discuss what the FDA can
do to fulfill its mission to protect and advance the public health by ensuring that the food and
beverages Americans are consuming are not harming them,” Sanders wrote to Califf. “I look forward to your testimony at this hearing.”