New research shows simple changes to food packaging, like adding traffic light-coloured health star ratings and warnings about the amount of exercise needed to burn the calories in specific foods, would help consumers to make healthier choices.
About two-thirds of Australian adults overweight or obese and that is projected to rise to 80 per cent by 2025.
Despite new labels which could help us make healthier food choices, the food industry is likely to resist.Credit:Getty
One new study, published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, analysed 15 randomised controlled trials that compared Physical Activity Calorie Equivalent or Expenditure (PACE) food labelling with other types of labelling or no labelling.
An example of a PACE label is that 22 minutes of running is required to burn off a small bar of milk chocolate.
The researchers, from Loughborough University in the UK, found that when PACE labels were applied people ate up to 195 calories less per day, compared with other or no labels.
A second study, published in the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, found that the current Health Star Ratings (HSR) system could be improved with the addition of colour.
Using HSR coloured with the traffic light system (TLS) of green, amber and red, helped the 1003 Australian adults who were surveyed to read and choose healthier products more easily.
John Curtin Distinguished Professor Simone Pettigrew, from the School of Psychology at Curtin University and The George Institute for Global Health, says the current and projected obesity rates are “system-breaking level stuff”.
“Something has to be done. Part of the problem now is that we have a highly processed food supply so people are largely unaware of what they are actually eating,” she says. “People make food choices in a supermarket in less than a second, which means that’s not enough time to use cognitive processing.
“You are just using your immediate, instinctive response to things. Those packs are now developed so cleverly, to give you an immediate impression of healthiness, that we all struggle. Without really objective information on the front, you’ve got no hope.”
Pettigrew insists that while the current HSR system “definitely can and does work” to affect behaviour change, it can be enhanced.
“The average supermarket [has] 25,000 food products,” she says. “Our little brains have to deal with all of that information to make choices. Whatever we can do to help people on the front of packs is good.”
Adding PACE labels can help us look past the palatability to the “longer-term consequences” of consuming certain foods, while the TSL works because interpreting colour is an “instinctive biological thing”:
“It really does just help us more quickly and easily glance at something and get an appreciation of what it’s trying to tell us.”
But, it is unlikely these recommendations will be implemented in the foreseeable future.
Mandating the HSR is “quite a complicated process”, and while the current five-year review has led to a refining of the HSR algorithm so manufacturers are less able to “game” the system, it has been recommended that the system remains voluntary.
Manufacturers are unlikely to add PACE labels voluntarily, and the food industry has “fought quite hard against” the TLS in the past, so it is also unlikely to happen within the next five years.
“The food industry will say to us ‘no, no that’s imposing all kinds of costs on the sector because you have to have four colour presses etcetera and that’s disadvantaging products out there that are just black and white who will now need to invest in colour printing’.”
“It’s a bit of a battle. We want as much simplified nutritional information on the front of pack as possible and [the food industry] want the least.”
Sarah Berry is a lifestyle and health writer at The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
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