Summary:
The Food and Drugs Act aims to prevent adulteration of food, which includes regulating its composition, sale, advertising, and labeling.
Description:
The Food and Drugs Act regulates the composition, sale, and presentation of food and drugs. It also establishes offences for harmful practices involving these products. The Act seeks to protect consumers from unsafe, adulterated, or misleading products. In addition, it defines offences related to food that may harm human health.
The Act prohibits adding substances that make food injurious to health. It also prohibits removing food constituents when that process creates harmful products. Furthermore, it prohibits selling, offering, possessing, or advertising those products for human consumption. The Act considers both immediate and cumulative health effects when assessing whether food harms health.
Considering FULL purposes, the law brings the following highlights:
- It defines advertisement broadly (Article 1). Its definition includes notices, labels, wrappers, invoices, oral announcements, and communications using light or sounds.
- It brings labeling requirements, prohibiting false or misleading food labeling (Article 5)
- Labels must not misrepresent a product’s nature, substance, or quality.
- Labels that mislead consumers about nutritional or dietary value also violate the Act.
- Accurate ingredient statements alone do not prevent liability when the overall label misleads consumers.
- It brings advertising restrictions, prohibiting advertisements that falsely describe food or drugs (Article 5).
- Advertisements must not mislead consumers about a product’s nature, substance, or quality.
- The Act treats misleading nutritional or dietary claims as misleading quality claims.
- Publishers may rely on statutory defenses when they unknowingly publish misleading advertisements during ordinary business activities.