Authorised Health Claims May Not Help Consumers to Choose a Healthy Diet

Abstract

ious dietary factors (outer two rings) that have beneficial or adverse effects on the principal physiological risk fac-tors (middle ring) which impact upon the pathological events (inner ring) leading to cardiovascular disease. A general yellow ring, described as ‘ less controllable factors’ is positioned between the physiological and dietary fac-tors to indicate the differences observed between people with regard to genetic factors [8], early-life factors [9]and the distribution of body fat [10] . The scientific basis for the inclusion of the dietary factors in the outer two rings in figure 1 is the WHO report on Diet, Nutrition and the Prevention of Chron-ic Diseases [11] . Although this report is now 10 years old, it still represents the most comprehensive and au-thoritative review of the impact of dietary factors on heart health and is still used as the basis for healthy eat-ing advice given by many health professionals. Table 10 of this WHO report summarised the strength of the ev-idence of factors (foods and food components/nutri-ents) contributing to the risk for developing cardiovas-cular diseases with the terms ‘convincing’, ‘probable’, ’possible’ and ‘insufficient’. We have included all grades of evidence here except ‘insufficient’ and have only dis-tinguished between ‘convincing’ and ‘probable’ (in reg-ular type) and ‘possible’ (in italics). For all except three More than 10 years ago, the European Commission proposed a regulation of nutrition and health claims [1–3] . After agreeing on the procedure for submissions and the terms of reference for the scientific assessment, and setting up the authorisation procedures, the European Union (EU) Register on Nutrition and Health Claims was established, which currently contains opinions on 2,204 submitted health claims, 252 of which have been autho-rised. Although the main impetus for the regulations was the protection of consumers from unwarranted claims, it was also recognised that health claims should be helpful in choosing a healthy diet [2, 3] . We have compared the authorised health claims relating to diet and heart health with generally agreed dietary recommendations for the prevention of heart disease as a way of examining wheth-er the regulations can indeed assist consumers in choos-ing a healthier diet [4] .