Something to chew on
It is getting harder to plead ignorance over which foods offer true health benefits, writes Britt Mann.
When it comes to conventional dietary wisdom, reading the nutritional information on the pack is up there with drinking eight glasses of water and eating 5+ a day.
Information about what exactly is in our food is in formats increasingly easier to read and understand. It’s getting harder to plead ignorance about a food’s health benefits or lack thereof.
What exactly is on the pack?
By law, the label on a package of food sold in New Zealand must list the ingredients (with a few exceptions), in descending order of the quantities present.
The package also has to note a product’s energy load and the amounts of major nutrients such as protein, fat and carbohydrates per serve, and per 100 grams, in a standardised table known as the Nutritional Information Panel (NIP).
Serving size is dictated by the manufacturer. Food that’s sold and served immediately to the consumer is not required to have an NIP attached.
As of June 2014, food manufacturers can also opt to put a ‘‘health star rating’’ on the front of their products’ packages. It rates foods from half a star to five stars; the higher the star count, the better a food’s nutritional profile. The system also includes icons for energy, saturated fat, sodium and sugars, and nutrients such as calcium or fibre.
Why were health stars introduced?
Research shows the presence of NIPs has a negligible impact on consumer choices. Consumers either don’t understand the information, or don’t know how to use it.
The health star rating is printed on a product’s prime facing area, so consumers can see it without plucking the product from its shelf. It gives consumers nutritional information at a glance - and also offers a conclusion, based on algorithm-crunched data, about a product’s overall health merits.
The health star rating tool is best used to compare like products, such as breakfast cereal X and breakfast cereal Y.
Major manufacturers such as Sanitarium and Kellogg’s have enthusiastically adopted the labelling, to stay competitive with each other. Unlike a NIP, which must appear in a standardised format, health star ratings can be presented according to a product designer’s whim.
Is the information making a difference to consumer choices?
The effect of front-of-pack labels on consumer choice had not been tested before the health star rating was introduced.
Dr Rob Hamblin, a senior lecturer in Otago University’s school of commerce, has since researched the effect.
Over six weeks, Hamblin’s team asked 1200 breakfast cerealbuyers to indicate which of two