Lemonade mix, chicken nuggets and fruit snacks are just a few of the products you may see at the supermarket with a “natural” claim on the packaging. But today, the US Food and Drug Administration announced that it was seeking comments on how the term should be defined, indicating that maybe—just maybe—there will finally be some meaningful regulation around a term found on $40.7 billion worth of food products in the US.
The word “natural” has a long and sordid history when it comes to federal oversight, beginning in the mid-1970s, when the Federal Trade Commission proposed defining natural foods as any “with no artificial ingredients and only minimal processing.”
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