The FDA likes to claim that its warnings on packs of cigarettes have saved thousands of lives in the last five decades. That may be true, but the increasing number of premature deaths caused by its food labeling standards could potentially outweigh those lives saved.
The issue is simple: The current food labelling standards provide a big nudge for people to eat less saturated fats and more carbohydrates, and an increasing body of scientific knowledge is telling us that this is a grievous mistake: saturated fats are much less deleterious to health than previously thought, while eating carbohydrates is the absolute worst thing that a person can do if he wants to control his weight.
The steady increase in obesity over the last two decades, which social scientists have blamed on a variety of social ills like urban “food deserts” and duplicitous marketing strategies by food producers is, it appears, actually a direct result of government intervention in the market. The Wall Street Journal recently laid out a scathing indictment of the failure of food labels at protecting consumers. If thousands of people have likely died prematurely owing to this policy, why on earth is it still being enforced?
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/food-labels-kill
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