There is a new government regulation of food labeling that will deem foods healthy or unhealthy. The intent of this new plan is to attempt to persuade people to avoid more processed foods and the illnesses that come from overconsumption of those foods. However, this new tack is a double-edged sword.
The benefit of this agenda is to educate people otherwise unaware of some necessary nutrition facts. One of the few tenets from nutrition studies is that eating too much processed food has long-term health repercussions. The food industry offers tasty, cheap food accessible to everyone without warning against the potential results of eating too much of their products.
The government plans to present warnings to the public about these foods to continue a public health campaign to decrease the power these companies wield over unsuspecting customers. Certainly no one could have predicted the overall success the public health campaign against the very powerful tobacco industry, so why question this initiative.
The difficult question is where to draw the line about labeling foods. For people stuck in an eating disorder or very restrictive eating, labeling is likely to only encourage and sustain the eating disorder symptoms. Labels will only make it harder to change ingrained behaviors around food and very rigid eating.
Ultimately, the problem with labeling stems from the wide range of disordered eating in our society from the effects of a nefarious food industry to the power of the exercise and diet industries to fuel an obsession with thinness.
Since the companies market differently to different demographics, no government decision will help all sides of the problem.
Perhaps the balanced approach to labeling foods would be to also attempt to regulate the exercise and diet industries, not just the food industry. The industrial wellness complex, as it has been called, needs attention from all sides. Regulating one side may help one set of people while hurting others.
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