The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 278 No 7448 p463-464
21 April 2007

This article
Reprint   Photocopy

PDF 100K, Acrobat Reader

Why and what pharmacists need to know about nutrition labelling

Most people will have noticed food labelling being debated in the news, but what are the factors being discussed? Pamela Mason reports

SUMMARY

Labels on foods have long been a source of confusion for consumers. Food labelling is regulated by legislation which requires all pre-packaged food to be labelled with the name of the product, the weight, a list of the ingredients, use by or best before dates, the name of the manufacturer and a batch number.

However, what has been the subject of more recent debate is nutrition labelling, which should be distinguished from food labelling.

All nutrition labelling in the UK is voluntary unless a nutritional claim is made. For example, if a product claims to be “low in fat”, the corresponding nutritional information (eg, amount of fat per 100g) must be provided to justify the claim.

Consumer surveys show that people would like to understand better what their food contains. Moreover, with the increase in the number of people who are overweight or obese and the health risks of high intakes of fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt, it is important that people have easily applicable information to balance their diets appropriately.

Processed food makes up a considerable proportion of the UK diet and food labels are an obvious source of health promoting information and education. Some products, for example, make consumers more aware that they should be eating five portions of fruit and vegetables each day by claiming they contribute to a “five a day diet”.

In 2004, the Government announced its commitment to developing a new nutrition labelling scheme for the front of food packaging, known as a signposting scheme. Front of pack signposting is an additional voluntary scheme aimed to make it easier for people to choose a healthy diet by providing at-a-glance information about the fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt in food.

This seemed to be a good idea and two schemes, the multiple traffic light scheme and the guideline daily amounts (GDA) scheme, were developed and are now running in parallel.

Full text article (PDF 100K)