> I thought the food labels sucked compared to food labels in the US. > When it comes to occupational health and safety you can't say European standards are be

> I thought the food labels sucked compared to food labels in the US. > When it comes to occupational health and safety you can't say European standards are better. First off, US food labels aren't nearly as strict as most people think. There are a number of exceptions and cases where things simply don't have to be listed, and in others the label can outright lie. Tic tacs somewhat famously are listed as having "zero calories." They do not. But because tictac says the serving size is one and it has below a certain number of calories, they're allowed to round down to zero. But there are also allowances for simply not listing ingredients. Another example is that US food manufacturers were required to label if a product contained allergens, but the whole thing has been watered down because they lobbied for an additional rule, which was that they could just slap a warning that a product might contain allergens and not have to test for allergens at all. Similar to CA' widely mocked Prop 65 labels. The reason those labels are worthless is because the industry lobbied to be allowed to just slap the label on everything and not have to test their products for toxic materials. Speaking as someone who lives in the US: US food labels contain more because there's far more allowed to go into the product, because corps have said "let the market decide, if they don't want RED40 in their food they won't buy it." The industry also incessantly fights the FDA on what's considered toxic, and even if it is, trolls over "well there's only a very tiny bit of it, so you have to prove it'll ACTUALLY have an effect on people" which of course is very difficult if the risk is statistically small and there's a million other things that can be the same or greater risk. In the EU, toxic crap for the most part isn't allowed in the food period, so there's less need to be so strict about what does or doesn't go into a food label, because EU consumers don't have to both educate themselves in what's toxic and check a label to see if it's got something that is toxic in it.