Little Evidence Supports the FDA’s Proposed Food Label Rules

In the upcoming issue of Regulation magazine, Robert Scharff, associate professor in the Department of Consumer Sciences at the Ohio State University, and Sherzod Abdukadirov, research fellow in the Regulatory Studies Program at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, argue that the FDA’s two proposed rules on food nutrition labeling are supported by little evidence and should be scrapped.


The food labeling rule would, as Scharff and Abdukadirov explain, result in a number of changes “involving both formatting and content changes to labels, increases in recordkeeping, and new analytic requirements.” The second rule, the serving size rule, would affect packages that contain a small number of servings. 


The FDA claims that implementing both of these rules will help Americans make healthier food choices. However, as Scharff and Abdukadirov point out, the FDA does not cite any work that supports the underlying assumption that consumers will change their short‐​sighted behavior if changes are made to food labels. In fact, an FDA‐​commissioned study found that increasing the font size for calorie information on food labels had no effect on consumer behavior. In addition, the FDA has provided little evidence that inserting a separate line on labels for “added sugars” will result in health benefits.


Aside from the lack of evidence cited by the FDA, Scharff and Abdukadirov explain that the study on the effects of regulations written to comply with the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, which is used by the FDA to make the benefits calculations of its proposed rules, is flawed. Not only is the study unpublished and yet to be peer reviewed, its sample is limited to women aged between 19 and 50 years old, which artificially inflates the effects of nutrition labels on behavior because women are more likely to view nutrition panels than men.  


If the two proposed rules are implemented they will add billions of dollars in costs for consumers. Such an expensive change in regulations should have to be justified with good empirical data. Scharff and Abdukadirov show that the FDA’s proposed rules are justified mostly by good intentions, not data.