Helping people make a healthy choice?

The use of nutrition labels on food packaging is a controversial and complex issue.

What health information should be on a packet of cereal or a box of biscuits? The question has proved controversial, with a split between the public-health lobby and the food industry over what consumers want and need from food labelling. In the middle of this argument, the European Union is trying to come up with a new regulation. But researchers say they still have an incomplete picture about how consumers use nutrition labels or how they affect diet choices.

The existing research on food labels has two main defects, according to a paper in January’s edition of the Journal of Public Health by the European Food Information Council (EUFIC) – a group of academic researchers funded by big food and drink companies and the European Commission.

One problem is that most research has been carried out in the UK. This is where the debate over fat and food labels has been most intense, but that does not mean that findings can or should be generalised to the rest of the EU.

The second problem is that most studies rely on shoppers’ reports of their own behaviour after the event, which tends to lead them to exaggerate their reliance on labels.

The EUFIC team set out to correct these faults by observing shoppers in six countries: France, Germany, Hungary, Poland, Sweden and the UK.

Researchers lurked in the supermarket aisles where breakfast cereals, yoghurts, ready meals, soft drinks, snacks and confectionery are displayed, ready to ask people about the goods they had just picked up. Their most striking finding was that most shoppers were not interested in nutrition information. Just 17% looked for nutrition information, although this varied between countries – 27% of British shoppers looked for labels, but only 9% did in France.

Other national differences emerged. Two-thirds of the Polish shoppers who looked for information on nutrition were counting calories, but fewer than one in five Swedish shoppers (17.5%) was; in Sweden more people (45%) were interested in fat and sugar content.

The team found that most consumers were able to pick out the healthiest choices by using food labels. This suggests that the problem is consumers’ motivation to use labels, not their understanding, suggests Jo Wills, director of EUFIC. She says: “In an ideal world, if nutrition information was clear and understandable, it would lead to consumers making a choice for a healthy and balanced diet… but not everyone is interested in a healthier choice.”

Fact File

Changing the rules

The EU is updating its rules on food labelling, but agreement is elusive. The European Commission promised that its proposal would cut red tape, by turning eight existing laws into one regulation, and would respect national differences, by allowing member states wide scope to adopt national rules.
But industry groups have said that the draft regulation is unworkable and would weigh heavily on small businesses. Health groups were more favourable, but would have preferred a clear proposal for ‘traffic-light’ labels, where the healthiest foods win a green label, and foods high in sugar, salt and fat are marked with red.

Under the Commission proposal, food manufacturers would be required to display details about energy, fat, saturated fat, carbohydrates, sugar and salt in letters at least three millimetres high on the front of packs.

Click Here: Cardiff Blues Store

But Renate Sommer, the German centre-right MEP leading on this dossier for the European Parliament, wants to scrap this approach. Consumers would be overwhelmed with information, she says, while the minimum font-size requirement would create bulkier packaging, more waste, and potentially larger portions.

Under her re-drafted version, only calories would be on the front of the pack. She also proposes different rules to ensure that the text is legible rather than merely specifying font size. Sommer would also have preferred that the Commission waited for the findings of an EU-funded research project (see main article).

The environment committee will vote on Sommer’s report next month (16 March), with the full Parliament expected to vote in June.

Furthermore, as Wills points out, consumers have conflicting preferences: they want food packs to provide information that is both simple and complete. Also, “consumers don’t want to feel coerced or that they are being told what to do”.

An ideal format

The next stage for researchers is to understand more about how consumers use labels and whether they lead people to make healthier choices.

This is one of the aims of an EU-funded project known as ‘food labelling to advance better education for life’, or FLABEL. The hope is that this three-year project will produce the ‘ideal format’ for a food label by the time it concludes its work in 2011.

But cereal packs and yoghurt pots are only the start. The next frontier for nutrition research is to understand how consumers might respond to food information in cafes and restaurants, as well as information about portion size.

As Wills explains on this last point: “There is so much concentration on what we should eat, but very little concentration on how much we should be eating.”