First lady Michelle Obama is joined by the Ex Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius and FDA Commissioner Margaret Hamburg with a goal of changing food labels that appear on over 700,000 products. The change would be the most drastic change to the food label in over 20 years. The group’s focus and goal is to provide more accurate and informative information about the product. Changes to the label would include more realistic serving sizes and information about added sugars. The amount of calories that the product has would also be larger and easier to read.

The revamp of the food label is part of Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move!” initiative. The initiative is mostly to stop obesity in youths and their communities in America. Other parts of “Let’s Move!” have been redesigning school’s food options and promoting exercise and healthy eating outside of school. The food label is supposed to help parents make smarter choices when it comes to buying food for themselves and their kids.

Other countries have different designs for food labels. Great Britain, Australia, Sweden, and Denmark use an “at-a-glance food” label that gives basic dietary information about the product. In Australia, they use at-a-glance food labels and food is ranked on a star system, one star being not healthy and five stars being very healthy. Great Britain’s at-a-glance gives dietary information as well as daily percent values.

Obama’s project is estimated to cost $2 billion dollars to revamp all the food labels. The $2 billion dollars would come from taxpayer money. However, Michelle Obama and her trio say that the benefits could result in $20-30 billion dollars.

Prices aside, the new food label is something that could help Americans. Food labels today provide information about unknown chemicals and things we can’t even pronounce, however, they are essential to eating healthy.