Should you ignore the food traffic lights?

With green meaning it’s good and red as a warning, they’re the labels designed to make choosing a healthy diet easier. But as our shopping challenge shows, the signals are VERY confusing

YOU see them on food packets — red, amber and green colours that are supposed to depict whether the food you are putting in your basket is healthy — or not.

Introduced in 2013 by the Food Standards Agency, the traffic light colours are assigned for levels of fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt.

The NHS website says that if there are a lot of greens on the labels, then ‘you know straight away that it’s a healthier choice’.

‘You can eat foods with all or mostly amber on the label most of the time’, while red on the label means you should ‘try to eat them less often and in small amounts’.

Traffic light nutritional information is provided per average serving size and per 100g for food, or 100ml for drinks — and simplified into a percentage. Foods are given a ‘red’ light for saturated fat if they are more than 5 per cent saturated fat, ‘amber’ between 1.6 and 5 per cent; and ‘green’ for 1.5 per cent or less saturated fat.

For sugar, it’s ‘red’ if it makes up more than 22.5 per cent of the food, ‘amber’ between 5.1 and 22.5 per cent, and ‘green’ if it’s 5 per cent or less. As for salt, it’s ‘red’ if foods are more than 1.5 per cent salt, ‘amber’ between 0.4 and 1.5 per cent, and ‘green’ if 0.3 per cent or less.

However, the Department of Health and Social Care and the Food Standards Agency are consulting with manufacturers and the public to see if some other scheme is better, partly because the labelling hasn’t translated into longterm health benefits.

Data from the Health Survey for England shows that since the scheme was introduced, obesity levels have risen (62 per cent of adults were overweight or obese in 2013, compared to 64 per cent in 2019), the incidence of high blood pressure has stayed constant, and the proportion of people with raised cholesterol has fallen (from 48 per cent to 43 per cent) — overall, not exactly a ringing endorsement.

‘one criticism is that it only focuses on the negative nutrients,’ says dietitian Helen Bond. ‘For example, some dairy foods might have red for saturated fat, but this overlooks the good amounts of calcium and protein they contain.

‘And some products high in fruit sugar may show red while actually being a good source of nutrients such as vitamin C and fibre.’

Here, with help from Helen Bond, Good Health reveals some of the cases where the traffic light system gets it wrong…