FDA openly admits it doesn't know what defines 'healthy' in food products containing good fats

Tuesday, October 11, 2016 by: L.J. Devon, Staff Writer
Tags: FDA, healthy fats, food labels

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(NaturalNews) The Food and Drug Administration, trusted with regulating the safety of foods, openly admits that it cannot determine what "healthy" means on product labels. As its shallow surface requirements for food labels come under increasing scrutiny, the agency is turning to the public for answers. It seems the agency is unable to differentiate between something as simple as good and bad fats.

KIND snack bars, full of good fats, challenge definition of 'healthy' at the FDA

Previously, in order to have "healthy" on the label, food products had to be low in fat, sodium and cholesterol. Those shallow requirements have come into question as products like KIND snack bars challenge old thinking patterns about good and bad fats in foods.

KIND snack bars are made mainly of nuts, and since nuts are high in fat, they are restricted from being labeled healthy. Unable to distinguish between good fats and bad fats, the unintelligent FDA bureaucracy sent a warning letter to KIND, purporting that the company's KIND bars fail to qualify as "healthy" food. KIND responded, saying that the FDA's definition of the word "healthy" needs to change, not the other way around. The FDA ultimately agreed and allowed KIND to keep using the term "healthy" on their labels.

It's the same problem the medical system has in distinguishing between good and bad bacteria, as antibiotics wipe out both, leaving patients susceptible to future infections.

Shallow FDA label requirements tell half the story

FDA requirements for healthy foods rely on outdated generalizations about fat and cholesterol. The requirements do not take into consideration the hundreds of chemicals that the FDA allows in food products in the first place. The requirements also do not consider the heavy metal, pesticide and herbicide concentrations in food products. No importance is placed on the mineral profiles of foods, which are all but destroyed by over farming and the loss of permaculture and organic farming practices that sustain the nutrition in the soil.

Food labels only tell half the story, keeping the public blind to the real problems in the food supply. For instance, a UCLA study measured the iron content of spinach from crops grown in 1953, compared with crops grown in 1997. They concluded that someone would have to eat 43 bowls of spinach today to get the same amount of iron that people got from one bowl of spinach in 1953!

Instead of correcting the systemic problems with our agriculture system, the FDA permits more food chemicals to be added to products labeled as safe, thereby disrupting our body's ability to process the little nutrition that's still left in food.

Many questions to consider when determining what a 'healthy' food label should mean

The FDA confuses the public and does it a grave disservice by establishing shallow rules, blocking the public from knowing the benefits of good, healthy fats. Instead, all fats are just labeled as bad and shunned.

Regardless of what consumers understand healthy to mean, the FDA can promote the overall improvement of all food by stopping the addition of chemicals. The agency could additionally test products for pesticides and herbicides. A product could theoretically be nutritious, but if it contained high levels of the herbicide glyphosate, that nutrition would go unused in the body because glyphosate interferes with the body's microbiome and ability to assimilate nutrients.

Should pasteurized, processed milk products be allowed to be advertised as healthy? Since the pasteurization process destroys the enzymes and amino acids, how can the product benefit the body at all?

There's much to consider as the FDA begins asking for the public's help to determine what defines "healthy" in food products.

Sources include:

Vitals.LifeHacker.com

TurtleMountainBlog.com

DrAxe.com

WyebrookFarm.com

Regulations.gov