final week America’s Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said it would reconsider its definition of “healthy”. The move follows a petition by KIND,a company that the FDA had scolded for using the term on the wrapping of its snack bars. KIND removed “healthy” from its packaging, then argued the FDA’s definition was absurd. The agency, or which is allowing KIND to achieve the word back on its products,now says it will re-examine its rules. So what is “healthy”, anyway?Few agree, and thanks to nutrition research that is as extensive as it is imperfect. The gold standard of medical evidence is the randomised,controlled clinical trial. In nutrition, researchers like tracking the effect of diets over long periods of time, and so many studies are observational. Often,they utilize questionnaires to discern what their subjects eat. Such data are imprecise. Some people can’t remember precisely what they ate; others feign asceticism. Predictably, such methods produce research with conflicting results. A review published in 2012 found that most common foods are linked with both a higher and lower risk of cancer.
Fat may be...
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Source: economist.com