Abstract
Health-related claims on food products influence consumers and their food preferences. None of the European countries have restricted the use of health claims to foods of high nutritional quality despite the regulatory background provided by the European Union in 2006. We evaluated the nutritional quality of foods labelled with claims available in the Slovenian market using two nutrient profile models—Food Standards Australia New Zealand (FSANZ) and European World Health Organization Regional office for Europe model (WHOE)—and compared the results to the nutritional quality of all available foods. Data for prepacked foods in the Slovenian food supply were collected in 2015 on a representative sample (n = 6619) and supplemented with 12-month product sales data for more accurate assessments of the food supply. A considerable proportion of foods labelled with any type of health-related claim was found to have poor nutritional quality. About 68% of the foods labelled with health-related claims passed FSANZ criterion (75% when considering sales data) and 33% passed the WHOE model (56% when considering sales data). Our results highlight the need for stricter regulations for the use of health-related claims and to build upon available nutrient profiling knowledge to improve nutrition quality of foods labeled with health-related claims.
Highlights
Nutrition has an important role in the prevention of noncommunicable diseases [1]
We evaluated the use of nutrition and health claims as defined within the European Union (EU) Regulation 1924/2006 on nutrition and health claims [11]
This is a positive finding, indicating that in these categories products with better nutritional quality have higher market share by volume (Table 1). These observations should be interpreted with care because consumer food choices are dependent on many variables, and nutritional composition is usually considered as only one of those factors
Summary
Nutrition has an important role in the prevention of noncommunicable diseases [1]. Reformulating processed foods is considered as a major means to help reduce the prevalence of diet-related diseases [2]. The food industry has come under increasing pressure to improve the nutritional quality of processed foods. Food reformulation initiatives are mostly aimed at reducing salt, saturated fatty acids, trans-fatty acids, sugars, and total energy. While in some environments self-regulation and voluntary codes of practice can produce positive results, this is not always the case [3]. In cases where public health objectives oppose the commercial interests of the industry, regulatory interventions might become the most effective option [4]. In a global food environment, a harmonized regulatory approach is needed
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