By Patrice Onwuka | Commentary, Townhall.com
I am a mom of three school-aged boys who play multiple sports. They mostly drink water but enjoy juice, lemonade, and even slushies regularly. Like most parents, I am committed to establishing good eating habits for them early in life, but I bristle at the idea of a Washington, D.C. bureaucrat dictating to me what they should drink.
That’s why I am concerned about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) Childhood Diabetes Reduction Act, supported by Senator Roger Marshall. This federal bill opens the door to heavy-handed regulations on food and beverage labels that promise to make kids healthier but instead will make choices for parents costlier with little or no impact on health outcomes.
I support transparency: Transparency empowers parents to make good choices about what their families consume. The Food Industry Association finds that two out of three grocery shoppers value price transparency, namely easy-to-understand information such as ingredients, nutritional value, and production processes for the products they consume. However, this bill reaches beyond transparency in costly ways.
Sanders wants to mandate a new warning label be slapped on the front of foods and beverages with “high-intensity sweetener,” “ultra-processed food,” “sugar-sweetened beverage,” or other “junk food.” This may sound fine, except that there is no clear definition for “ultra-processed food,” and this ambiguity opens the door to nutrient-dense foods like pork being classified as unhealthy simply because they undergo processing.
I am all for consuming fewer calories and reaching for more fruits and vegetables, especially in meals and snacks for our kids. The challenge for many families is price and availability. Food affordability was in the top five concerns for Americans in a New York Times poll earlier this year. Short-term production issues can temporarily spike the prices of grocery store items. However, industry-wide mandates drive up the costs of hundreds of categories of goods for good.
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