The Nutrition Facts label, the black-and-white information box found on nearly every packaged food product in the U.S. since 1994, has recently become a symbol of transparency for consumers.
From Apple's "Privacy Nutrition Labels," which reveal how smartphone apps handle user data, to a "Garment Facts" label that standardizes ethical disclosures on clothing, policy advocates across industries are touting "Nutrition Facts" as a model for empowering consumers and enabling socially responsible markets. They argue that intuitive information solutions could solve a wide range of market-driven societal ills.
Yet this well-known, everyday product label actually has a complicated history.
I study food regulation and diet culture and became interested in the Nutrition Facts label while researching the history of the Food and Drug Administration's policy on food standards and labeling. In 1990, Congress passed the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act, which required nutrition labels on all packaged foods to address growing concerns about rising rates of chronic disease associated with unhealthy diets. The FDA introduced the Nutrition Facts panel in 1993 as a public health tool to help consumers make healthier choices.
The most obvious purpose of the Nutrition Facts label is to educate consumers about the nutritional properties of a food. In practice, however, the label has done much more than simply inform consumers. It also encodes a wide range of political and technical compromises about how to translate food into nutrients that meet the diverse needs of the American public.
Where does "% Daily Values" come from?
The daily value, or DV, percentages on the label do not all come from the same source. This is a reflection of different public health goals for the label.
Recommended values for micronutrients such as vitamins are based on Recommended Dietary Allowances, or RDAs, from the National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine. Vitamin RDAs were developed out of historical concerns about malnutrition and meeting minimum requirements.
Percentage Daily Values for macronutrients - carbohydrates, fats and proteins - are based on the U.S. Department of Agriculture Dietary Guidelines. Macronutrient DVs have registered a new concern about overeating and a focus on "negative foods" that encourage maximal intake levels.
DVs reflect two fundamentally different reasons for concern. Micronutrient numbers represent a floor: the minimum basic vitamin requirements that a child must meet to avoid malnutrition. Macronutrient numbers, on the other hand, represent a ceiling: a target maximum that adults should not exceed if they want to avoid future health problems caused by eating too much sodium or fatty foods.
Food and Drug Administration
Why 2000 calories?
The FDA used nearly 2,350 calories as a baseline for calculating daily values, because that was the recommended average calorie requirement for Americans ages 4 and older. But after pushback from health groups worried that the higher baseline would encourage overconsumption, the FDA settled on 2,000 calories.
FDA officials found that the figure was less likely to be "misinterpreted as an individualized target because a round number has less implied specificity." This means that 2,000 calories isn't really a target for most American consumers who read the label. Instead, it's an example of the public health preoccupation with collective risk - what one scientist called "treating sick populations, not sick individuals."
By choosing a round number that was easy to calculate with, and a calorie count that was lower than that of the average American, FDA officials were prioritizing practicality and usability over accuracy and objectivity. They reasoned that advocating the lower baseline of 2,000 calories would offset Americans' tendency to overeat and do more good than harm to the population as a whole.
Who determines portion sizes?
Under the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, serving size must reflect a "commonly consumed amount."
In practice, this involves routine negotiations between the FDA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture - which also sets serving sizes for diet counseling tools like MyPlate - and food manufacturers. Each conducts research into consumer expectations and food consumption data, taking into account how foods are prepared and "typically eaten."
Serving sizes are also determined by the product packaging. For example, a can of soda is generally considered a single-serving container and is therefore only one serving, regardless of how many fluid ounces it contains.
What's in a name?
The label was almost called "Nutrition Values" or "Nutrition Guide" to emphasize that Daily Values were recommendations. Then FDA Deputy Commissioner Mike Taylor suggested "Nutrition Facts" to sound more legally neutral and scientifically objective.
The new design-a clean, black Helvetica text on a white background, with indented subgroups and hairlines for readability-and the authoritative, bold title helped establish "Nutrition Facts" as an easily recognizable government brand.
This led to imitators in other policy areas: first, Drug Facts for over-the-counter medicines, then consumer protection initiatives across technology sectors, such as the Federal Communications Commission's Broadband Facts and AI Nutrition Facts.
The Nutrition Facts panel has remained largely the same since the 1990s, despite some updates, such as the addition of rules for trans fats in 2002 and for added sugars in 2016, to reflect changing public health priorities.
New ways to calculate facts
Establishing the Nutrition Facts label required building an entirely new technical infrastructure for nutritional information. Translating the diverse American diet into a consistent set of standardized nutrients required new measures, testing procedures, and standard references.
National Institute of Standards and Technology
A key player in developing that technical infrastructure was the Association of Official Analytical Chemists. In the early 1990s, an AOAC Task Force developed a food triangle matrix that divided foods into categories based on their proportions of carbohydrates, fats, and proteins. The idea was to determine appropriate ways to measure nutritional properties, such as calorie or sugar content, since the physical properties of the food would affect how well each test worked.
Legacy of the Nutrition Facts label
Today, public-private partnerships have taken this translation of foods into simplified nutrient profiles further by making nutrition facts plug-and-play. The USDA FoodData Central provides a comprehensive database of nutrient profiles for individual ingredients that manufacturers use to calculate nutrition facts for new packaged foods. This database also powers many diet and nutrition apps.
The analytical tools developed for the Nutrition Facts label helped create the basic information infrastructure for today's digital diet platforms. But critics charge that these databases reinforce an overly reductionist view of food as simply the sum of its nutrients, ignoring how the different forms a food takes - such as its moisture, fibrous materials or porous structures - affect the way the body metabolizes nutrients.
Many nutrition researchers concerned about the negative health effects of ultra-processed foods now refer to it as a food matrix. In doing so, they want to emphasize the opposite of what the AOAC intended with its food triangle: the need for a holistic understanding of how food affects health.
Perhaps surprisingly, the biggest impact of the Nutrition Facts label was that it prompted the food industry to reformulate products to achieve appealing nutritional profiles, even if consumers weren't reading the labels closely. While it was intended as an educational tool, I believe in practice the Nutrition Facts label has served more as a market infrastructure, reshaping the food supply to meet changing dietary trends and public health goals long before consumers find those foods in the grocery store.
Xaq Frohlich, associate professor of history of technology, Auburn University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.