19th June 2013

Traffic light labels – solution to the obesity epidemic or missing the point?

Today, the Government introduced a new and consistent system of nutritional labelling for manufactured foods.  The combination of traffic lights to indicate low, medium and high levels of key nutrients with a percentage of the guideline daily amount of each nutrient provided by a portion of food is thought to be the most informative to consumers when making food choices.   It’s true that this system may help consumers to compare similar products and chose those that are lower in sugar and fat for example but it somewhat misses the point that we should be educating children in schools about healthy choices, based upon real food ingredients.  Eating unprocessed, real foods and minimising the intake of pre-prepared, highly processed foods […]