I am a mom of three school-aged boys who play multiple sports. They mostly drink water but enjoy juice, lemonade, and even slushies regularly. Like most parents, I am committed to establishing good eating habits for them early in life, but I bristle at the idea of a Washington, D.C. bureaucrat dictating to me what they should drink. 

That’s why I am concerned about Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-VT) Childhood Diabetes Reduction Act, supported by Senator Roger Marshall. This federal bill opens the door to heavy-handed regulations on food and beverage labels that promise to make kids healthier but instead will make choices for parents costlier with little or no impact on health outcomes.

I support transparency: Transparency empowers parents to make good choices about what their families consume. The Food Industry Association finds that two out of three grocery shoppers value price transparency, namely easy-to-understand information such as ingredients, nutritional value, and production processes for the products they consume. However, this bill reaches beyond transparency in costly ways. 

Sanders wants to mandate a new warning label be slapped on the front of foods and beverages with “high-intensity sweetener,” “ultra-processed food,” “sugar-sweetened beverage,” or other “junk food.” This may sound fine, except that there is no........

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