It is a good thing that it has been so challenging to prove health claims for prebiotics and probiotics because it forces the industry to try harder to prove the worth of their products to consumers. There are a variety of health claims on different products already that can be a tad deceitful. Like a macaroni and cheese product with high amounts of saturated fats and sodium making the claim that it is high in calcium. This makes things confusing and misleading to people who just want to try to eat healthier. All kinds of different foods should be allowed on shelves as long as they are proven safe to consume, and there would probably be riots if people’s favorite ultra processed foods were taken off of the shelves because they cause diabetes and heart disease and other problems, but it would do good to take off the health claims on these products that still contain high levels of sugar, salt and fats. Maybe there should be a warning instead like, “Warning: the high amounts of saturated fats in these chips can lead to heart disease”.
It is important to keep regulations on products strict to prevent people from buying them thinking it will save their life, and then it turns out that the product actually had no beneficial probiotics or prebiotics in it at all. Because one aspect of a food might be healthy but that does not mean that it isn’t offset by another unhealthy part of the food product. An example that I can think of is Poppi getting sued for lying about the gut health claims they make on their soda cans. The lawsuit said that there was so much sugar in each can to really reap the benefits that they claimed, a person would have to drink four cans of Poppi a day. Perhaps Poppi, like other companies, might be trying to sneak in health claims that don’t show the full reality.