Burkey Belser, designer of the nutrition facts label, has died | Hacker News Reader

Burkey Belser, designer of the nutrition facts label, has died

washingtonpost.com

107 pointsNaOH67 comments

Like the ADA, one of those things that are so good for the public health (even if imperfect) that it's amazing to think that there was a version of America where it was capable of being considered, let alone passed. Consumers need information if they're going to have any hope of making informed decisions. Trying to eat healthily in our sugary wasteland would be an insurmountable task without having this information at my fingertips.

It is information that is so incredibly useful, and this is shown by how ubiquitous such labels became elsewhere in the world only after they were pioneered by the FDA first.

People might be surprised by this, but as far as I can tell such Nutritional Facts labelling didn't start being required on packaging in Europe until the late 90's, several years after the full mandate in the US and nearly a decade after the original proposal in the US.

> such Nutritional Facts labelling didn't start being required on packaging in Europe until the late 90's

Do you or someone else happen to know which directive made it mandatory? I found Council Directive 90/496/EEC of 24 September 1990[1] which harmonised labeling, but only made it mandatory when there's a nutrition claim on the label/advertised. Otherwise it was still optional.

[1]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/ALL/?uri=CELEX:31...

It seems it was spread out in different ways over time- you can read various amendments to the '90 directive that started to make specific things mandatory instead of optional in the opening parts of Directive 1999/10/EC [1] - there had been amendments for specifics on sweeteners and such before, and in '99 a few more things mandatory depending on claims by the manufacturer it seems...

but as far as I can tell there was no obligation in Europe to have the level of detail about fats, sodium, etc. like the US's labels had until even later- maybe 2006? [2] and there was the last major change it seems in 2011 which is what is still essentially in place today. But yeah, it seems like the level of information made mandatory and not optional wasn't like it is today until around or maybe slightly after the Millenium.

[1] [PDF] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:...

[2] https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:02...

Too bad we haven't updated our labeling laws to match theirs. Nutrition facts based on a consistent amount of material are much more useful than the hodgepodge we get.

Our law says that the portion sizes must be the amount that people typically consume at once. Which conceptually makes a lot of sense.

Nutrition facts per 100g is conceptually nice, but if the amount people typically eat at once is not 100g, then that means more math. Furthermore, in the US most recipes are not done by weight, so to be useful for recpie calulation, we would need to use say per 8 fl oz for liquids, a per

The problem with the US system is more that the FDA implements it based on survey results for categories of food, and only occasionally update the value. This means that food that falls in one category, but that consumers treat like it falls in a different one can get laughable portion sizes, and the same thing happens when the values become out of date.

Manufacturers don't really get a lot of discretion on choosing the listed serving size for most foods, with only a few places where the rules let a manufacturer choose (like for discrete units that take more than half and less than two thirds of the RACC, where the manufacturer can choose between a service size of one or two units). There are cases where manufacturers would prefer to list a different size (usually larger) because they know it is more accurate representation of what people consume, but they can't.

This is hardly the only issue. Some of the rounding rules can be rather absurd, meaning that is is not always possible to get accurate information for larger sizes by simply multiplying the values on the nutrition facts label.

RIP to Mr Belser.

I hope that we can add nutrition labels to alcoholic beverages in the near future.

Same here. Beer has more calories than Coke.

to underline your point.

Looks like regular Coke has 140 calories / 12oz serving.

A random sampling of my homebrew recipes (brewersfriend.com); 136 - British Golden, 163 - table saison, 215 - West Coast IPA, 307 - Imperial Stout.

But, to be fair, beer seems more filling than Coke.

My mom has told me how, when she was in college, sometimes she'd just drink a beer instead of having a meal, because it's filling enough and has enough calories to substitute a meal.

And ingredients!

Reinheitsgebot now!

> The Reinheitsgebot, literally "purity order", is a series of regulations limiting the ingredients in beer in Germany and the states of the former Holy Roman Empire. The best known version of the law was adopted in Bavaria in 1516 (by William IV), but similar regulations predate the Bavarian order, and modern regulations also significantly differ from the 1516 Bavarian version.[0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinheitsgebot

> Mr. Belser’s nutrition facts label — rendered in bold and light Helvetica type — was celebrated as a triumph of public health and graphic design when it debuted in 1994 following passage of the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act.

Wait, what? 1994? If you asked me when this label appeared, I would have answered: it's been there as long as I've been alive. I would have guessed it was added sometime in the 60s.

I'm nearly 52.

I have no memory of food products not always having had this label.

Crazy.

They did have nutrition labels, but they were voluntary, so you maybe did see "nutrition facts" of some kind, but they could have had any appearance or title and could make any claim deemed "truthful".

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK209859/

> Every manufacturer should be encouraged to provide truthful nutritional information about his products to enable consumers to follow recommended dietary regimens. (WHC, 1970)

> Food manufacturers were eager to respond to the consumer interest and did so in a variety of ways, often through the use of an assortment of new, undefined claims on product labels that attempted to state or imply something about the special value of the food, such as “extremely low in saturated fat,”

This article contains an image of a 1987 bran flakes label, which shows calories, proteins, fat, cholesterol, vitamin content, ingredients etc., mostly the same content but without the styling of Mr. Belser's nutritional facts label https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2014/02/25/282628088/nu...

In turn, the nutrition label has inspired cybersecurity transparency labels for devices.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37392676

> [FCC] cybersecurity labeling program would help consumers compare IoT devices and make informed purchasing decisions, drive consumers toward purchasing devices with greater security, incentivize manufacturers to meet higher cybersecurity standards to meet market demand, and encourage retailers to market secure devices. The proposed IoT label would offer a trusted, government-backed symbol for devices that comply with IoT cybersecurity standards.

The current nutrition label design was a huge step forward from what preceded it, but is overdue for a reevaluation. As understanding of health effects have of different foods have changed, so should the information hierarchy displayed on the label. The ratios of fats, carbohydrates, and protein should be instantly visually glanceable. Fiber content should be much more prominent. The reduction in fiber is probably one of the most salient characteristics of "processed" food.

The biggest complaint I have is that anything sold in a non-resealable single-serving container should be treated as one serving, regardless of any standardized size.

So for instance a can of soda should be totaled on the full 12oz, not the 8oz serving size that no one actually consumes.

I’d like to see per 100g standardized in a second column like it is done in Mexico so that you can actually compare products regardless of what they say their serving size is (first column).

That makes way too much sense to ever actually happen.

Why can something so simple and unobjectionable happen in other places but not the US? Your knee-jerk response is the same as my own, but I wonder to what extent the apathy/cynicism has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Lobbyists and runaway corporate greed.

TIL corporations in Mexico aren't greedy and there is no lobbying/corruption...

Blimey. We're just learning about the person that invented this type of labelling, in the US.

And don't blame lobbyists; they should be lobbying, just as a public defender should be defending their client. The people deciding the wrong thing after all lobbying has happened are to blame, especially given they're funded by mandatory taxes.

It’s ridiculous that companies are allowed to just conjure up a unit of measurement (the Serving) out of thin air purely to confuse the public.

Companies aren't allowed to choose whatever serving size they want. Serving sizes are governed by federal regulations drawn up by the FDA, which means they have the force of law.

21 CFR § 101.9(b) defines general procedures for determining serving sizes: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/21/101.9

21 CFR § 101.12 defines specific "reference amounts" for particular food categories: https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/21/101.12

See, for instance, § 101.9(b)(6) which says: "A product that is packaged and sold individually that contains less than 200 percent of the applicable reference amount must be considered to be a single-serving container, and the entire content of the product must be labeled as one serving."

This is the most glaring flaw of the system. The per serving amount is often arbitrary or misleading and just adds noise. I would rather know the total for everything inside the container and estimate my own serving.

I think no one has actually made a nutrition facts label here, but when you are making it, it is sooo easy to manipulate it to get what you want and in practice, most of the customers, like 85-90% of them don’t look at the serving size, they just look at how much and get deceived. I think most food companies know this deep down and use it.

There is also the rather annoying thing where you can round so a tic tac is allowed to say it has zero grams of sugar, despite being nearly all sugar.

I noticed this insanity on a spray can of Pam the other day as well. "0" calories if you only spray it for 1/4 second.

Yes, I've seen a can of spray oil for sale with 0 fat per serving and some 1,500 servings per container. It's ridiculous.

This is why there are standard sizes in the US. So you can compare products and smaller products aren’t able to advertise as low calorie.

But that's exactly what they're doing! Note the "Serving Size: 1 piece (0.49g)"

https://commonplacefacts.files.wordpress.com/2019/07/img_070...

True, you can compare tic-tacs to other similar candies, and discover that they all have zero grams of sugar, apparently.

if you're eating enough tic tacs for this to matter, you have bigger issues

When's the last time you checked? Because the FDA did fix that issue (although it happened very recently, I believe during the pandemic). There are exceptions where the manufacturer can (a) put both the recommended servings and total package size as two columns and (b) can still use servings if the non-resealable container contains 2 or more servings (e.g. a party sized bag of chips).

I remember looking at the nutrition label on my popcorn box. It looked something like https://i.redd.it/9elpy3nck0x61.jpg. It would be nice if in addition to their measured nutrition they just have a simplified "1 bag = ...".

The ratios of fats, carbohydrates, and protein should be instantly visually glanceable.

Not sold on this. Most people can't use ratios effective ime, and it's not obvious what 'good' or 'bad' ratios are, which means it'd mostly be ignored. I agree about fiber content. The most astounding thing to me about the existing label is that it uses metric units, a rare triumph of common sense over xenophobia.

Mainly my thinking is to provide some perspective to food labeling that says "high protein" (can be as little as 10g), but then has 80g of sugar.

Surely more than 50% of people could figure out a pie chart if it became standard labelling.

Barycentric coordinates in a triangle wouldn't be a bad visualization...

Pet peeve: switching between units.

If protein is in grams, serving size should not be ounces!

IT would also be great if the ingredients were somehow color coded based on some approximate population wide risk factor.

I understand what you're going for, and it would be helpful as a consumer.

I work for a food manufacturer, and speaking only for myself as an industrial engineer, it'd be a pain to have a handful of colors added to every ingredient statement. Each color is another thing that can go wrong in manufacturing, and that quality needs to be checked against. Depending on packaging type, you might see branding slowly tend towards whatever standard colors simply because it'd simplify the packaging printing and could reduce the cost.

Such as the Nutri-Score printed on labels in the EU?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nutri-Score

That's an interesting idea, but I was more interested in a per-ingredient basis. Different people have different nutritional needs, requirements and even philosophies.

https://www.paho.org/en/news/29-9-2020-front-package-labelin...

I wish they had a standardized QR code format containing the nutritional data so you weren't reliant on third-party databases to scan them. If it was a compact data format it would easily fit in a small QR code.

There are different kinds of fibers as well - insoluble vs soluble fiber, soluble is generally harder to find in foods.

On the subject of nutrition labels — the thing I always look for is Added Sugar, and even if it’s zero , I look at the ingredients list and find things like stevia extract and erythritol which have at best unclear implications health-wise. There should be a law saying these sugar related facts should be printed very clearly upfront in large font so they are not damn hard to find. End rant.

> things like stevia extract and erythritol which have at best unclear implications health-wise

Stevia is a natural sweetener that has been generally recognized as safe by the United States. Tens of thousands of studies conducted in Japan demonstrate its safety and they've used it as a dietary supplement for decades. Various cancer research institutes have also ran large-scale human studies that support its safety. Do not confuse Stevia with aspartame, saccharin, and other artificial sweeteners.

Stevia doesn't have the same mouthfeel as sugar and has a tendency to develop a bitter taste above a certain quantity but I attribute that to the typical American sweet tooth; I have no trouble flavoring drinks with Stevia because I prefer about half the level of sweetness that a commercial product might otherwise have.

It’s good to see these safety studies from the POV of “is it carcinogenic”, but I am also concerned whether it has the same metabolism/diabetes links as normal glucose sugar?

It does not. Stevia is a herb, no fructose or glucose. There is no reason to believe it is anything but benign.

I had to chuckle at the Tic Tac label the other day.

The first ingredient is "sugar" but because the serving size is 1 tic tac each serving contains 0 calories, including 0 calories of added sugar.

The magic of rounding!

My bigger issue is when drinks advertise "less sugar" but include these things, and I have no clue until I take a drink then have to throw the rest away because it tastes disgusting.

Yes stevia is the worst.

As a fan of Allulose et al, my peeve is when the box says No Sugar Added but the nutritional label clearly states that the product is mostly date powder.

That’s a good point. I need to educate myself on whether the sugar from fruits is just as “bad” as “added sugar”. Something about glycemic index etc.

So pro consumer. They need to copy this to let people compare apartments: decibel level, heating costs, and crime rate.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burkey_Belser

What an irony that all healthy food – whole foods such as fruit, vegetables, fresh meat, and seafood – doesn't require the label at all.

"The squabbling resulted in a multitude of design ideas, including pie charts, sliding graph charts, colors and even the image of the sun."

Can you imagine if that's what we ended up with hahaha

His casket comes with a secret decoder ring inside

> The Agriculture Department, for instance, was concerned the label would cause consumers to eat less meat

This sort of thinking has probably killed more people than any war we've ever fought. If Americans didn't eat much meat, it likely wouldn't be the end of the world. But, because of special interests, here we are today.

I knew someone at Department of Agriculture who tried to organize meatless Mondays for the employee cafeteria. Needless to say special interests had beef with that and shut them down.

If they hadn't been afraid to hold Abstinence Fridays, then it might have been workable.

I'm eating exactly 2000 calories today in his honor.

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