Posts Tagged ‘FDA’

Americans are searching for healthy food. The FDA is working on its guidelines for what foods can claim to be “healthy” since it had to backtrack with the makers of Kind Bars. Delving into this issue, the New York Times reports some significant gaps between what nutrition experts think is healthy and what the public thinks. Number […]

FDA has just approved a new gastric drain device for the treatment of severe obesity and it’s easy to find people with strong opinions about it. The AspireAssist system consists of a small tube placed through the skin and into the stomach. It connects to a port on the surface of the skin outside the […]

At the PHA Summit yesterday, First Lady Michelle Obama announced that the new nutrition facts label is now final, putting added sugar in the crosshairs for consumers who are paying attention. FDA notes eight changes to the label, but the real action has been focused on sugar all along. Companies have up to three years to make […]

If you want a glimpse of how people feel about natural and unnatural food, just browse through many thousands of comments that FDA recently received on the matter. And this is just a prelude. The agency hasn’t proposed any rules yet. It hasn’t even decided if it will. FDA just asked for comments on putting the word “natural” on food […]

Diet soda? No thanks. Slow-churned, low-fat ice cream? Give us the full-fat stuff. Bacon? Please. Himalayan pink sea salt? Sprinkle generously. More and more, American consumers are looking for all-natural fat, sugar, and salt in their foods. No more diet factory food for us. Edy’s Grand full fat ice cream is up 10%, while their […]

Is food labeling “a surprising failure” as Omri Ben-Shahar suggests in Forbes this week? Or is the truth of food labeling that “knowledge is power,” as Emma Axelrod suggests in the Brown Political Review? The strongest example of a failure for food labeling that Ben-Shahar cites is the case study of restaurant menu labeling. The […]

Contrave, a combination of bupropion and naltrexone, will be going back to Orexigen, which is the small biotech company that developed it as a treatment for obesity. Takeda, which launched the drug less than two years ago under a licensing agreement with Orexigen, announced Tuesday that it had decided to give up the marketing rights for Contrave in the […]

A major new study shows that people treated with liraglutide for type 2 diabetes have fewer strokes, heart attacks, and deaths from heart disease. Six years ago, cardiovascular outcomes had doctors scratching their heads about diabetes and obesity drugs. A hearing on a flawed outcome study with sibutramine resulted in its withdrawal from the market. […]

The folks at Zafgen released a glimmer of hope for beloranib this week. On Wednesday, Zafgen announced that this investigational new drug met its two primary efficacy endpoints in the pivotal clinical trial for treating Prader-Willi syndrome (PWS). In December, that trial was halted after a second patient suffered a fatal blood clot in the […]

The story of FDA objecting to a fake mayonnaise product calling itself Just Mayo™ has reached a happy ending just in time for Christmas. FDA has saved face and seemingly not backed down from its definition of what mayonnaise is. Hampton Creek, the startup behind this product, has kept its branding and won lots of […]