Changes May Be Coming to Nutritional Labels, Probably Won't Make You Any Healthier

Those little nutritional labels on the sides of your boxes of food? They might be changing soon. The Food and Drug Administration has proposed multiple changes to the label, including making the number calories more obvious, removing the calories from fat while keeping the calories from transfats, and highlighting Vitamin D and potassium?

Will this make you healthier? Probably not. I know all of you look at the labels when you're shopping, but don't tell me you guys know how many servings you're eating. But hey, it might help.

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One of the big proposed changes that might actually help has to do with serving sizes. Things that are regularly consumed in one go will have serving sizes that correspond to that. You won't see 2.5 servings in this container on a bottle of soda anymore (Who stops drinking a bottle of soda after two-fifths of a bottle, anyways). In addition, the FDA is also adding new categories for foods that weren't wildly available when nutritional label use became mandatory for prepared and packaged foods (Fun fact, that happened in 1990). Think mirin, nori, pot stickers, hoisin sauce, those kinds of will get new classifications.

The proposed changes have kicked off a 90-day public comment period. If they pass, you could see the new labels on store shelves in a few years.

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