The US Food and Drug Administration's role in improving nutrition: Labeling and other authorities

The US Food and Drug Administration's Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition establishes regulations and guidance to enable consumers to make nutritious, healthy food choices and to protect the public from contaminated or otherwise unhealthy foods. The Center is known for its robust portfolio in the area of food safety, including prevention of foodborne illness, but also in nutrition, which is the emphasis of this overview. The breadth of the agency's efforts and accomplishments in this and related areas is demonstrated by recent regulations and policies issued on food labeling, trans fat, sodium, folic acid fortification, and inorganic arsenic in foods, each of which is briefly discussed. As this work was presented at the annual meeting of the National Nutrient Databank Conference held in 2016, implications of FDA's actions for nutrient databases are included as appropriate.