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Comment by alphazard | Hacker News Reader

The success of the Nutrition Facts labeling does not get enough publicity.

Rather than outlawing certain ingredients, or creating some kind of health score which a product must be above, Nutrition Facts is a way for suppliers to attest to information about a product in way that is legally binding. If it isn't accurate the penalties are steep.

Consumers then have the information they need to vote with their wallets. Markets cannot function properly without symmetric information, and Nutrition Facts essentially creates a functioning market where one did not exist previously.

Any effort to regulate what's in food would probably be better spent expanding what must be in the Nutrition Facts label. I guess it's nice that we are finally getting around to banning artificial trans fats, but anyone who can read has been able to keep those out of their diet for years. The same can be said about the next bad ingredient, and the one after that.

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Interestingly, there is some gaming of the main number everyone looks at on the nutrition facts chart: calories per serving.

All snacks aim to fall at or below a certain number the FDA (or some other agency) put out as being considered a snack. Planet Money did an episode on different M&M varieties having different total weights to account for their different calorie counts. So you get fewer by weight peanut butter M&Ms because they’re more calorie rich

This doesn't sound bad to me? At large, people eat a package of whatever snack they choose to buy. Also at large, people assume different packages of snacks should be roughly comparable for important metrics. And calorie count is probably up there for important metrics.

This isn't without downsides, of course. The case of manufacturers adding allergens to food deliberately is alarming in its own way.

I'll add, a family member has celiac which makes it so they can't eat gluten. Becoming certified "Gluten Free" requires a certification process that can be expensive and difficult. However many companies have realized they can label their product "Gluten Friendly" and get around the requirements. It is annoying.

Surely, you aren't complaining of peanuts in peanut butter, so can you share an example, and why the allergen presumably shouldn't be there?

I had the same questions and found this article: https://snacksafely.com/2016/06/kelloggs-unintended-conseque...

Basically, there were stricter measures put in place called HARPC. From my linked article:

> The new directives mandate that the “Top 8 allergens” identified by FALCPA (peanuts, tree nuts, milk, eggs, wheat, soy, fish, and crustacean shellfish) must either be ingredients of the product and identified as such, or the manufacturer must take extra care (and cost) to ensure that there is no cross-contact with them. There is no middle ground or “out” for the manufacturer, which is why we believe “May contain” type label advisories are heading for extinction. And that poses a problem, at least in the short term.

> companies, when faced with the added burden of instituting and documenting cross-contact prevention measures as dictated by HARPC, may instead choose to add trace amounts of the allergen to the product, as doing so makes the allergen an ingredient of the product and obviates the need for preventative cross-contact measures for that allergen.

> it means that manufacturers will either take stricter measures to prevent cross-contact or add a trace amount of the allergen and list it in the ingredient list, thus eliminating the ambiguity that currently plagues us all.

> A compromise that might have avoided the unintended consequences of companies like Kellogg’s adding traces of allergens to their products is to have offered them a third option: A mandatory “May contain” label advisory for any product made on shared equipment or in shared facilities that did not meet the FSMA threshold for cross-contact prevention. Such label advisories are voluntary today, rendering them ambiguous at best, but a definitively worded and located advisory statement included on all such products would have provided a way for manufacturers to meet the requirements of HARPC without resorting to the addition of allergens.

So I'd be surprised if it was happening on an ongoing basis, but I can definitely see why people would be irked.

The penalty for having an allergen present is steep, and the process of certifying that yes, you are in fact allergen free, is expensive and difficult, while the cost of adding an allergen into your process, for pretty much any foodstuff, is cheap, and the cost of slapping a "may contain peanuts" label on is cheaper.

I believe the original comment was complaining about the perverse incentive there.

And if may contain is not enough or allowed, may as well throw some amount of peanuts in and list it. And cover all the bases.

Apologies, I should have included a link. I am referring to https://apnews.com/article/sesame-allergies-label-b28f8eb3dc....

Mayhap that is overblown? I confess I have not followed it too heavily. Very thankful that I am not allergic to anything in my adult life.

I don't have any food allergies, either, so I admittedly don't pay much attention to allergens (or even listed ingredients most of the time). I'm genuinely curious, too.

No, we are complaining about the way the government handles allergen labeling.

It used to be that companies could slap a "may contain [allergen]" label on things that didn't contain it but were produced in a factory where cross contamination was a possibility. Such labels are *widespread*.

I don't understand the government's incentive in trying to stop this--the actual result was when cross contamination was a possibility the companies reacted by deliberately adding the offending material.

The problem is that it's being looked at in a binary sense. Either it contains the offending material and poses a danger to those affected, or it doesn't and is safe. However, in the real world there's a third population--those who are sensitive to the offending ingredient but not dangerously so. Possibility of cross contamination? That is not going to be a deterrent to me as the worst case outcome is merely unpleasant. Does contain? I'm going to treat it with great skepticism.

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