This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Richard A. Williams, Jr, PhD; Elizabeth A. Yetley, PhD
Food and Drug Administration Washington, DC

Josephine A. Mauskopf, PhD; Gary A. Zarkin, PhD
Research Triangle Institute Research Triangle Park, NC

JAMA. 1992;267(3):362-363.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—As many of your readers may know, the Food and Drug Administration currently is developing regulations to enforce the Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990, which mandates sweeping changes in the information presented on food labels. We recently estimated the benefits of the proposed nutrition label changes using the model described in a recent JAMA article "What If Americans Ate Less Fat?" by Browner et al.¹

We are concerned that physicians will interpret results like those of Browner et al to mean that patients should not be advised to change their diets. The results of the study by Browner et al demonstrated a modest 3- to 4-month increase in average life expectancy due to a change in fat intake from a "best" diet. However, using a population average to summarize the effects of all consumers changing their diet obscures larger increases in individual longevity. For . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?