Tougher standards sought for food's medical claims

General Mills Inc.'s Cheerios are among the foods that should be held to the same scientific standards as pharmaceuticals when promoted as having health benefits, a report ordered by U.S. regulators said yesterday.

The Food and Drug Administration doesn't police food makers' medical claims as rigorously as those made by drug companies, the Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academies in Washington, concluded in its report. Cereal boxes touting the cholesterol-lowering power of Cheerios, for example, should be supported by more scientific research.

Health claims on foods can "impact a far greater portion of the population than do drug claims," and may cause harm if they are misleading, the institute said. One out of every four dollars spent by U.S. consumers pays for FDA-regulated products, the report found. While 75 percent of those dollars go to foods, dietary supplements and cosmetics, the FDA doesn't review these products before they go on sale.

Food marketing "has just been the Wild West, where people have been making amazing claims about foods that have been untethered to reality or evidence," Harlan Krumholz, a professor of medicine at Yale University who served on the committee that produced the report, said in an interview. "With foods, we need to do at least as well as we're currently doing with drugs, and to be honest, with drugs we have to be doing a lot better."

The FDA's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition has a $470-million budget to regulate the $525-billion food, supplement and cosmetics industry, the institute said. Legislation may be required to empower the FDA to evaluate food companies' claims of health benefits with "the same degree of scientific rigor" it uses in evaluating drugs, the report said. "Health claims are about marketing; they're not about health," said Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition at New York University, in a telephone interview. "If I were a food marketer, I would be trembling in my shoes." Enhanced FDA regulation of food, if enacted by Congress, would be "an enormous change in the game," because most claims that processed foods have health benefits can't be scientifically proven, Nestle said.