Could ‘traffic light’ labelling system help shoppers buy healthier food?
We’re all familiar with the phrase “You are what you eat”, but in practice it’s often hard to know exactly what we’re eating, and how it might affect our health.
For example, many processed foods can have higher salt, sugar and fat than we realise, so might be better as a treat rather than a daily indulgence.
At the moment, there’s a huge variety of ways that food manufacturers provide information about the nutritional content of their products, which can be confusing for consumers trying to make healthy choices.
To try to make things easier, the Government has been running a public consultation on nutritional labelling – which we’ve contributed to – to find the best way of providing clear and consistent information on food packs.
In our submission to the consultation we’ve recommended that all manufacturers adopt a single “traffic light” system, showing the levels of fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt in each product. These would be colour coded red, amber and green and labelled high, medium and low, making it easy for people to see exactly what they’re getting.
This consultation is a great opportunity to bring in a scheme that will make it easier for people to make healthy choices about what they eat, and we’ve recommended what we think is the best approach. And it’s absolutely vital because obesity is the biggest preventable cause of cancer in the UK after smoking, contributing to around one in twenty cancers.
