Starred choices
COULD IT soon be easier to choose healthier foods in the supermarket?
That’s the idea behind the new health star rating food labelling system. The front-of-pack labels use a five-star scale to reflect the nutritional value of packaged food – similar to the energy star system we have on appliances now.
The system takes into account four aspects of a food that are associated with increasing the risk factors for chronic diseases (energy, saturated fat, sodium and total sugars), along with certain positive aspects of a food, such as fruit and vegetable content, dietary fibre and protein content.
The scheme is voluntary, and the Government expects the labels to start appearing on shelves in six to 12 months.
So what will this mean for consumers? There’s some criticism that we haven’t gone for a traffic light-style system, as they have in Britain. There’s good local research to suggest that traffic lights are better at helping people make healthy choices.
Anything that helps us make a better choice more easily is a step in the right direction. Stars have to be better than what we have now, a mish-mash of manufacturer-invented labels along with the regulation nutrition information panels.
Of course, the star system will be more helpful if most food manufacturers decide to put it on their products. I hope most will, even if their products might not all be five-star winners. Perhaps a positive is that it could encourage some to reformulate their products.
As far as shoppers go, there are a couple of things to remember.
Firstly, don’t forget about context. It’s been said that a product like Marmite will get a poor rating because of its salt content. The star system measures foods per 100 grams, but you’d never eat 100g of Marmite at a time – you might use only 4g or 5g, providing a fairly small amount of salt and a useful amount of vitamin B12.
Conversely fruit juice – which most nutritionists would suggest we limit – could score 4.5 stars out of 5, but this isn’t a licence to drink it three times a day.
The second thing to remember is that the healthiest foods are the ones that typically don’t have any labels on them at all – fresh vegetables, fish and lean meats.
No matter what labels we choose to use, we still have to use our common sense. We know that a highly processed food with a long list of ingredients is probably not as good for us as something whole, fresh and unprocessed.