Do front‐of‐pack nutrition rating systems and symbols (FOPS) direct consumers to the healthiest products in an unregulated environment?

Abstract

Concern has been raised that unregulated FOPS may mislead consumers into believing that a single food is ‘healthier’ than foods not bearing the FOPS. The nutritional criteria of a non‐profit (Health Check™) and a manufacturer (Sensible Solutions™) FOPS were applied to a national database of packaged food products. The proportion of foods qualifying for a given FOPS was compared to the proportion carrying the FOPS using exact binomial test. 7503 and 3010 of the 10,487 foods in the database could be assigned a Health Check™ or Sensible Solutions™ food category, respectively. 3360 (44.8%) of the foods assigned a Health Check™ category qualified for a Health Check™ symbol and 560 (7.5%) foods carried the symbol. Up to 2380 (79.1%) of the foods assigned a Sensible Solutions™’ category qualified for a Sensible Solutions™ symbol and 122 (4.1%) foods carried the symbol. The discord between products qualifying for and carrying these FOPS persisted at the food category and subcategory level. More than 75% of the products in many of the subcategories of either FOPS qualified for their respective symbols. These results suggest that FOPS are not always a useful guide to identifying the healthiest food products as more products qualify for these systems than are identified by the systems’ symbols.Grant Funding Source: Earle W. Mc Henry Research Chair Award (M.L.), CIHR Frederick Banting and Charles Best Canada Graduate Scholarship, Cancer Care Ontario/CIHR Training Grant in Population Intervention for Chronic Disease Prevention: A Pan‐ Canadian Program (#53893), and CIHR Strategic Training Program in Public Health Policy (T.E.)