Nutrition facts label
Additionally, there is a requirement for ingredients to be listed in order from highest to lowest quantity, according to their weight.
The label was mandated for most food products under the provisions of the 1990 Nutrition Labeling and Education Act (NLEA), per the recommendations of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. It was one of several controversial actions taken during the tenure of FDA Commissioner Dr. David Kessler. The law required food companies to begin using the new food label on packaged foods beginning May 8, 1994. (Meat and poultry products were not covered by NLEA, though the U.S. Department of Agriculture proposed similar regulations for voluntary labeling of raw meat and poultry.) Foods labeled before that day could use the old label. This appeared on all products in 1995. The old label was titled "Nutrition Information Per Serving" or simply, "Nutrition Information".
Dietary Guidelines for Americans
The Dietary Guidelines for Americans (DGA) provide nutritional advice for Americans who are more than 2 years old. The Guidelines are published every 5 years by the US Department of Agriculture, together with the US Department of Health and Human Services. The most recent edition is the 2015-2020 Dietary Guidelines for Americans. The nominal purpose of the Dietary Guidelines for Americans is to help health professionals and policymakers to advise Americans about healthy choices for their diet. Although the Dietary Guidelines for Americans are purported to be based on a systematic review of the current body of nutrition science, the Advisory Committee tasked with formulating the plan for retrieval and analysis of the scientific evidence for the current edition of the DGA used a less than rigorous process for assessing the health effects of consumption of saturated fat and salt and for assessing the health effects of a low-fat, high-carbohydrate diet. This less than rigorous review of the nutrition science literature resulted in omission of multiple large, high-quality, clinical trials and also omission of some high-quality prospective observational studies. Some Advisory Committee members also had conflicts-of-interest that in some cases were not fully disclosed. For these reasons, the quality of the Advisory Committee's Scientific Report and the validity of the 2015 - 2020 DGA itself has been challenged by critics as being unduly influenced by commercial interests and as being flawed due to confirmation bias of some members of the Advisory Committee.