Food and Drug Administration has suggested on Friday that restaurant diners will become aware of what they are eating based on menu categories.

With this FDA requirement, every chain restaurant, grocery store, bakery, coffee chain and convenience store will have to post the calorie content of all the items on their menu. Drive-through lanes and vending machines are also expected to follow the proposal.

Approximately 280,000 businesses will apply the calorie counts and could possibly be visible on every menu by next year. The requirement is a component of the legislation on health overhaul which was signed as a new law last year.

Menu tagging will inform the consumers about the calories in the food they eat in which a third of calories come from dining out. Obesity is a huge problem right now and this is most likely caused by overindulgence in calorie consumption.

Meanwhile, movie houses are exempted from this proposal as well as bowling alleys, airplanes and other establishments whose chief dealings do not involve food.

The nutrition policy director of the Center for Science in the Public Interest Margo Wootan disagrees on the exemption of alcohol in the calorie count since this can be misleading to the customers. He concurs, however, that the guidelines put forth by the FDA are an optimistic step in battling obesity.

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It can be recalled that the federal government has guaranteed the consumers that artificial food colorings are safe with no possible health issues. Now, they approve the public reassessment on whether or not foods like Minute Maid Lemonade, Jell-O and Lucky Charms cereal which all use bright artificial colors.

The re-examination will focus on the possibility that artificial food colors can contribute to worsening of behavioral implications such as hyperactivity in most kids.

Although the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has already concluded that no definitive connection exists between behavior problems and colorings, they will as the experts to make a review on the evidences and eventually provide recommendations on feasible changes in the food coloring policy, which might include warnings on food labels.

In a scientific report of the FDA, it has been deduced that typical children will remain unaffected by the food dyes. However, kids with behavioral disorders might be an exception.

Meanwhile, Dr. Lawrence Diller, a pediatrician in California said that diet plays negligible to nonexistent role in childhood behavioral problems.

Also, researching on pediatric conduct is both complex and expensive. Synthetic colorings used today have long been approved by the FDA including yellow (#5), red (#3), and blue (#1).

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The Food and Drug Administration recently launched their website cascading health information on recently approved drugs and vaccines that can be very useful to health care professionals and patients.

FDA aims to share what it has acquired with regards to the wellbeing of a new drug, like vaccines and new medicines.  Reports of safety alerts and product recalls are updated on a regular basis.  An improved search engine to supply important and useful results is also enhanced.

Safety evaluations have been posted for 26 drugs permitted between September 2007 and January 2008 and is currently assessing another 20 or 30 drugs. The first 26 range from Anthelios 20, a sunscreen cream, to Afluria flu vaccine to Simcor, a combination of a statin and niacin to lower cholesterol. Eighteen drugs were recorded as safe and FDA found no unforeseen crucial negative side effects. For the remaining eight which are still under evaluation, the agency learned that serious unpleasant effects were already included on the label and were related to the patient’s state, thus, no label changes were suggested.

The FDA Data Standards Council bring together the assessment, advancement, safeguarding, and implementation of health and regulatory data standards to make certain that universal data standards are used all through the agency.

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The difficulties of constructing food composition tables and nutrient databases lie mainly on the fact that choosing foods would commensurate on various criteria. The quality of food composition data is greatly influenced by the control of variation in food composition, the accuracy in the description of nutrients, the methods of analysis and the mode of data expression (Leclercq et al., 2002).

Fact is that the most important macronutrients and minerals are well covered in European food composition databases, but fractions of nutrients (such as fractions of carbohydrates) and vitamins are stated less extensively in some countries. Other nutrients are generally present but the data may be lacking for some foods or be available only for raw foods. Also, tables of food composition never include all processed foods available on a national market.

The true range of food items available for consumption is almost impossible to document due to the continuous introduction of new products and variation in recipes. Another issue is that there are differences of analytical data between tables are both actual (due to variability in the composition) and artifactual (Leclercq et al., 2002). Foods, as biological materials, exhibit natural variations in the amounts of nutrients contained. Variability is higher for some nutrients, especially micronutrients. For example, processed foods can be tricky to recommend because there are variations in the composition of ingredients and changes in formulation and production over time. Another crucial point for the comparability of food composition data between countries is that of the definition of foods. The usage of free language can lead to misunderstanding because the same food product could be named in different ways and, on the other side, different products could be indicated by the same name. For example, the name of fishes varies from region to region.

Lastly, the difficulty in constructing food composition databases is showcased in the differences in the description of nutrients. The current terms fat, protein and carbohydrates in food tables still refer, in most instances, to chemically inconsistent, so called “crude” fractions in foods, which do not behave uniformly in digestion and human nutrition and are unreliable for energy calculations. In the case of carbohydrates and fibre, from a nutritional point of view, there would be a need to distinguish between glucose, fructose, galactose, sucrose, lactose, maltose, oligosaccharides, available starch, resistant starch and dietary fibre. Very few tables reach this level of detail and these substances are aggregated according to varying criteria.

In the UK, the food composition tables are based on the McCance and Widdowson’ The Composition of Foods, 6th edition and the software Diet Plan 6. The UK food tables have limitations because of accuracy of data, time changes, entry of new foods, variations in post harvest values, microwaving/steaming values are not included and most foods are frozen before it is analysed. However, the most practical problem I have encountered of the UK food tables is that it needs to be constantly updated, since there are new foods entering the UK diet each year. Also, a known major source of error in food tables also comes from the estimation of nutrient intakes. For example, calcium intake varies for all people in different ages and gender. For people with lactose intolerance, they should be provided with several options of food sources that do not have dairy ingredients. Making these updates and pairing up the people with appropriate diets can be a gargantuan task that must be balanced in a way that virtually all people can benefit from these food tables.

In constructing food tables for Sudan and Turkey, I would suggest a food composition table that has high calcium because milk consumption in these areas is not common, unlike in Scandinavian countries. Recommending a food table that has different sources of calcium, other than milk, can also be helpful to raise their awareness about the ilk of calcium deficiency. Since these countries are composed mostly by Muslim people, the food tables should also stay away from products that use pork or products derived from it. In constructing food tables, you should not only consider the nutritional values of food, but you should be aware of the cultural preferences.

Source:

Leclercq, C., Valsta, L.M. and Turrini, A. 2001. Food composition issues – implications for the development of food –based dietary guidelines, Public Health Nutrition, 4, 677-82.

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