This week, I have an update to a story that I started covering way back in 2016.
After 7 years of deliberation, the FDA has announced new criteria for which foods deserve to be called healthy. Plus: Are air-fryers really better for you?
Nutrition Diva is hosted by Monica Reinagel. A transcript is available at Simplecast.
Listen to my interview with Liz Shaw on the pros and cons of air fryers.
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Hello and welcome to the Nutrition Diva podcast. I’m your host, Monica Reinagel, and this week I have an update to a story that I started covering way back in 2016. The FDA has spent the last 7 years coming up with a new set of rules for which packaged foods can promote themselves as healthy. And today, I’ll fill you in on what they came up with.
But first, a quick answer to a question sent in by Giselle::
“My kids have been campaigning for me for to buy an air fryer. Everyone seems to be talking about them but I'm a little suspicious. I get they use less oil, but is a chicken wing cooked in an air fryer healthier than one I could bake in my oven?”
There wouldn’t be a big difference nutritionally between a chicken wing cooked in an air fryer and one baked in the oven. However, in terms of the texture, the air-fried wings might be a better imitation of deep-fried wings than the oven-baked would be, and would obviously be much lower in oil.
Air fryers are essentially countertop convection ovens. They use swirling hot air to create the crispy, browned texture that you get from deep-fried foods using only a tiny amount of oil. Not only do you consume much less oil (and calories), but you aren't left with a quart or two of used oil to throw away.
Researchers from Miami University compared conventional deep-fried French fries to convection-fried and oven-baked fries (which is how I had always done it.). Both the oven-baked and convection-fried potatoes contained much less oil than the deep-fried ones. To my surprise, however, the convection fries contained only half as much oil as the oven-baked—just 1 tablespoon per batch. And again, the texture of air-fried French fries is much more similar to deep-fried than regular oven-baked ones are.
Air frying is also quicker than oven baking. On the other hand, most air fryers have a fairly low capacity, so if you’re cooking for a big crowd, this can be a downside.
(I talked more about the pros and cons of air fryers in episode #568, with registered dietitian and cookbook author Liz Shaw. You can find a link to that episode in this episode’s description.)
And now, let’s turn our attention to the FDA’s big news.
The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is the agency that gets to decide what kind of health claims American food manufacturers can make about their products. The claim that you’ll find on a package of oatmeal, for example, stating that oats help lower your cholesterol, is allowed to be there only because the FDA has approved it. Make a claim that the FDA hasn’t approved and you may find yourself in a heap of trouble.
That’s what happened back in 2016 to the company that makes KIND snack bars. KIND bars are made primarily out of nuts, whole grains, and other wholesome ingredients. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being a completely unprocessed food and 10 being the most highly processed food, I’d put them at about a 3.5 or 4. The nutrition values vary from bar to bar, but I’m impressed that there are half a dozen flavors (called Nuts and Spices) with 5 grams of added sugar or less.
And yet, when KIND bars tried to promote their bars as being healthy, they were pursued by the FDA for making false claims. The FDA argued that KIND bars were too high in fat to be labeled healthy—even though the moderate amount of fat in these bars came from nuts.
Hello, FDA? It’s the 21st Century calling. Fat is no longer considered unhealthy—particularly the healthy fats found in nuts. In fact, the American Heart Association recommends that we eat an ounce of nuts every day—and a KIND bar probably contains about half of that amount.
To their credit, KIND pushed back against this ridiculous regulation—and won. And the FDA went home to update its criteria for what kinds of foods can be labeled as “healthy.”
That process included soliciting comments from the public about what criteria should be used to determine whether a packaged food can be labeled as healthy. Industry representatives—as well as lobbyists for other points of view—got to work arguing for criteria that would be friendly to their own products and/or hostile to foods they want to sanction.
Dr. Neal Barnard, for example, a prominent vegan activist, lobbied for criteria that would prevent meat products from being labeled as healthy. Food manufacturers argued for definitions that would favor their products, and so on.
Well, seven years later, the FDA is finally back with a proposed rule that attempts to "align the definition of the 'healthy' claim with current nutrition science," including the Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
According to the new rules, in order to earn the right to be promoted as “healthy,” foods will now have to contain a specified amount of at least one of the food groups, such as fruits, vegetables, grains, dairy, or protein foods. At the same time, it must not exceed maximum thresholds of added sugars, saturated fat, and sodium.
Not everyone is happy, of course. There is still a lot of debate, for example, over whether saturated fats are as harmful as some believe them to be—or whether all saturated fats are equally harmful. For example, the saturated fats in whole milk dairy do not appear to have the same negative impacts on heart health as saturated fats in other foods-–which raises the question of whether it’s really the saturated fats at all.
But almost any criteria you can think of will end up excluding some wholesome foods, or endorsing foods that aren’t particularly healthy. For example, the low-fat criteria that originally excluded KIND bars allowed things like fat-free pudding cups to be labeled as healthy.
While nutrition wonks debate what the feds got right and wrong in their new definition of healthy, food manufacturers who want to promote their products as healthy choices will simply pivot and reformulate as necessary. For example, under these new rules, you could use concentrated fruit juice or dates to produce foods that are quite high in sugar without triggering the added sugar limits.
In my opinion, this entire conversation is missing the larger point: No food product can reasonably be declared to be healthy (or unhealthy, for that matter) in a vacuum. And if you’ve ever emailed me to ask whether a certain food was good or bad for you, you know that my next questions are always these:
How much of it are you eating? If you’re drinking 20 ounces of soda every day, I’m concerned. If you have a small soda with your popcorn at the movies once a month, I’m probably not going to bat an eyelash.
What else are you eating? Cured and processed meats have a bad reputation for increasing your risk of certain cancers. However, when consumed with plenty of vegetables, this risk virtually disappears.
What would you be eating instead if you weren’t eating that? A meal replacement bar might not seem like a great choice compared to a salad. But if it’s that or a bag of M&Ms, I think I’d vote for the meal replacement bar.
What are your individual needs and goals? Do you need to limit sodium? Are you diabetic or pre-diabetic? Are you trying to gain or lose weight?
Foods often have a mix of good and bad points. How you balance them depends on the larger context as well as your personal situation.
Given all that, and the fact that “healthy” claims will inevitably do more to benefit food marketers than they will to benefit consumers, I think we should abandon the whole enterprise. Let’s just have the manufacturers list the ingredients and the nutrition facts and then let’s learn to make good choices based on something other than marketing claims.
Of course, if most of the foods you buy don’t have packages and ingredient lists, the less you have to worry about the ones that do.
Email me your questions at nutrition@quickanddirtytips.com or call the Nutrition Diva listener line at 443-961-6206 and your question could be featured in a future episode!
I’d also like to invite you to check out my other podcast. It’s called the Change Academy, where Brock Armstrong and I talk about how to create and sustain new habits. You can find it on all the major podcast platforms, so whatever app you’re using right now to listen to me, just head to the search bar and type in “Change Academy.”
Nutrition Diva is a Quick and Dirty Tips podcast. It's audio-engineered by Nathan Semmes with script editing by Adam Cecil. The rest of the team includes Morgan Christianson, Holly Hutchings, Davina Tomlin, and our intern, Brendan Picha."