In the 1950s and 1960s, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) debated the proper way to safeguard consumers from misinformation and fearmongering in health food markets. Initially, officials resisted nutrition labeling on food, seeing it as unnecessary “quackery” or the purview of medical specialists treating the ill.
But increasingly, the FDA had to weigh the growing legitimate medical interest in using diet as a preventative solution to public health, as well as the rise of a new self-improvement culture that made Americans more health conscious. FDA officials were also cognizant of declining public trust in the government’s ability to make decisions for consumers about their private lives after years of scandals. This shifted officials’ thinking and they began to accept that Americans had the right — and perhaps even the need — to seek out health information for food. They saw informative labels as empowering consumers to make choices for themselves, based on their own lifestyle, without FDA paternalism.
This new approach led to the 1973 introduction of a “Nutrition Information” panel to incentivize the food industry to make healthier packaged options. Adding the label was only voluntary, but if companies wanted to actively promote a heath claim or a food’s nutrients they had to include it to balance out their promotional statements.
While garnering some media fanfare, the nutrition information panel’s bland design lacked visual impact. If anything, it arguably did more harm than good, because it cleared the path for food companies to hype their products with dubious claims about health benefits. They focused on nutrition, while obscuring other information that might be vital for consumers to make educated decisions, like where a food came from or whether it was processed.
This trend intensified throughout the 1970s and 1980s as food companies buried consumers in hard to decipher nutrition information. By 1989, U. S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis W. Sullivan was forced to admit that “consumers need to be linguists, scientists, and mind readers to understand many of the labels they see.”
The confusing labels prompted growing calls for the FDA to update nutrition labeling rules. In 1990, Congress passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, which finally mandated that the FDA design a uniform nutrition label for all packaged foods. Over three years, the agency conducted extensive consumer research and stakeholder outreach with both the food industry and relevant consumer and health interest groups.