Smart Choices: Soon leaving a supermarket near you?

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The industry-funded Smart Choices food-rating system, which garnered a lot of bad publicity by famously labeling Froot Loops and other sugary cereals as healthful choices in the supermarket, has voluntarily suspended operations. The announcement came a few days after the Food and Drug Administration warned companies the agency was going to be taking a close look at front-of-package food labeling--and that it would act if it felt such labeling was false or misleading.

Here’s the story from Reuters, for example. Lots more out there on the Web.

Meanwhile, it’s celebration time at sundry food and nutrition blogs, including the ‘Food Politics’ blog of New York University professor Marion Nestle. ‘Who says the FDA does not have any power? I think it does. And let’s welcome it back on the job,’ she writes.

-- Rosie Mestel