Food Labels Explained

With the epidemic of obesity and diet-related diseases it’s never been more important to have clear food labelling.
Food manufacturers and supermarkets already label pre-packaged food products with information about ingredients and nutritional content but there has never been a standardised or mandatory system.

In January 2008 new rules from the European Commission made it a requirement for all pre-packaged food to clearly display its salt, fat, saturated fat, sugar, carbohydrate and energy content on the front of the product.

In the UK, meanwhile, the government’s Food Standards Agency (FSA) introduced the voluntary Traffic Light labelling, designed to make decoding key nutritional information easy for punters.

The Traffic Lights are a succinct way of providing basic information:

• Red indicates that ‘food is high in something we should be trying to cut down on’, ie. a treat.
• Amber indicates ‘the food isn't high or low in the nutrient, so this is an OK choice most of the time’.
• Green means ‘the food is low in that nutrient. The more green lights, the healthier the choice’.

The nutritional elements being quantified are specifically those old devils fat, salt and sugar. The Traffic Lights seem to be working: according to Which? magazine ‘97% of respondents were able to correctly identify and compare levels of nutrients using the traffic light system’.

This being Britain, however, nothing is ever going to be simple, and despite health minister Alan Johnson calling for a single labelling system agreed on by producers and the FSA, that hasn't yet worked out. Although most major manufacturers and retailers have revised their labelling, there is some reticence: notably about the colour system. Several have instead introduced a system of grey labels containing GDAs (Guideline Daily Amounts), with one major retailer explaining they were concerned red signs would put off customers.

Not only have retailers muddied the waters, introducing their own variations on the system, rival politicians and commentators have also weighed in with criticisms of the over-simplification, which would demonise the vitamin rich yet high fat avocado but give the green light to a particular brand of processed food oven chips. The shadow health secretary got to the crux of Britain’s contradictory relationship with food when he said, the system ‘is based on the concept of good or bad food, when what matters is whether a diet is good or bad’.

Although the government is slowly improving Britain’s food labelling, the system is still far from perfect, with the FSA ideal being arguably over-simplified, the European commission rules lacking the necessary punch, and many retailers unwilling to entirely play ball.