Team, if you haven't yet, head on over to 3PillersMethod.com to start a five-day free trial on my app. This is where you can go through the entire Three Pillars Method process to develop your own personalized nutrition plan for those weight, health, and fitness goals. That's 3PillersMethodod.com, and the link is in the show notes. Let's get into the show. Hello and welcome to the Consistency Project podcast. My name is Patrick Cummings. As always, I'm here with EC Sankowski. Every week on the show, we aim to simplify the science of nutrition, health, and fitness, cutting through the noise to focus on the principles and practices that will help you perform better, feel better, and of course live better. Thank you so very much for tuning into the show. Hello,

you see, how the heck are you? I'm great. How are you doing? I'm wonderful. We are going to talk

today about an updated definition of what healthy means. It should be pretty simple. Simple,

easy, quick. We're going to cover a couple topics. We're going to talk about the old 1994,

quote-unquote, healthy food label system, how it worked, and its limitations. We're talking about the new changes in the FDA's definition and what they can mean for us as consumers. And we're going to talk about whether labeling foods as quote-unquote healthy actually impacts our choices and our eating habits. So we're talking about some FDA regulations. Beyond that, give us a little bit of context so that we know what we're doing here. Yeah, it was really at the end of last year. The

FDA updated its final rule, its final definition on what defines, quote, healthy on a food label.

It actually fits pretty well. We talked about some front of packaging label. I feel like it was

recently, but I went back. I think it was August of packaging label. I feel like it was recently,

but I went back. I think it was August, so I guess not that recently. But yeah, I mean, I think it fits pretty well with some of the stuff that they're trying to do what looks like at that labeling. And I think it's pretty relevant to our listeners, right? What defines healthy? But yeah, as you kind of hinted at, I think this is one of these things that sounds so simple, but there's just like shades of gray and nuance.

And so let's get into it. Nothing around nutrition can be simple, can't anything. I know. I know. Not even a label. Not even a label. Okay. So I said right at the top there, there was an old system from the mid-90s. Maybe let's start there. Give us a sense of even what that was

before we talk about what the changes are going to be. Yeah. So the 1994 rule really looked at

specific nutrient levels. And one of the ways to be called healthy is it had to have limits on,

let's say, total fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, and sodium.

And so these were like these nutrients of concern that they're trying to limit.

In addition to that, they have like nutrients that they were trying to encourage.

So in addition to having lower levels of those, they wanted to have at least 10% of nutrients

like vitamin A, vitamin C, calcium, and iron.

Trying to show that, hey, we've got low levels of these things that we want to cut back

on and we've got higher levels of things that we need more of in the diet.

You know, it's good that they weren't just looking at just sodium or just cholesterol

and they were looking at a collection of markers or collection of nutrient values,

but I would say it's a little bit compartmentalized, just sort of thinking about food as its individual constituents.

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