public health
‘Healthy’ on the package may not mean more nutritious
When a label says “less sugar” or “lower in sodium” or “natural,” you might think that food or beverage is more healthy. If you did, you would be wrong half the time. A new Nature Food study, prompted by Cornell researcher Miguel Gomez’s puzzlement over a package at his supermarket promising lower-fat cream cheese, found that single-ingredient claims are often trade-offs for lower nutritious quality overall.
To see if products marketed as healthy (there’s an FDA definition) are better than those making no such claims, Gomez aimed the U.K.’s Nutrient Profiling Model at 10 years of new products launched in the U.S. market. The tool gives demerits for excess sugar, sodium, saturated fat, and calories but credits for fiber, protein, and fruit and vegetable content.
Two-thirds of the products were rated less than healthy, even though half boasted health claims on their packages. Beverages were the worst. Products labeled “natural” (there’s no FDA definition) had only a halo of health.
Back to the cream cheese: The maker cut fat but added more sugar and sodium compared to the original flavor. The lesson here is to read the nutrition facts labels on the back, not the claims on the front. And hope the U.S. will embrace the traffic signals used in Chile and Mexico. – Elizabeth Cooney
disability protections
Judge rolls back disability protections
The Justice Department said in June that it would no longer enforce laws that prioritized people with disabilities living and receiving services in their communities, rather than in nursing homes or facilities. It is making good on that promise.
A federal judge in Texas ruled Wednesday that the Department of Health and Human Services must remove every mention of community integration from a landmark disability rule, a significant reversal for a federal government that has prioritized this right for decades.
The decision arrives just a few weeks after the Justice Department joined the lawsuit, Texas vs. Kennedy, which started in 2024 after 17 states sued the Biden administration over their update to section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act. That part of the law prohibits disability-based discrimination by recipients of federal funds. The decision does not change the community protections ingrained in other laws like the Americans with Disabilities Act.
While the lawsuit has always targeted Section 504 disability protections, the case started with a much different target in mind. Texas and 16 other states initially sued the federal government because the Biden administration added gender dysphoria as a protected disability in their 2024 update to the law. Disability advocates publicly worried that the case would eventually dismantle other disability protections. They were right. — O. Rose Broderick
