Life> Health

Don't be fooled by the label

(Daily Mail)
Updated: 2007-02-25 11:31

Foods that are 'low fat', 'full of natural goodness' and 'light' sound like products we should be piling into our trolleys at the supermarket — but are they really healthy?

According to many experts and consumer watchdogs, it is often difficult to tell from reading food labels, which can be misleading and confusing. Even food industry insiders are at war about how to label foods. Last week the National Heart Forum criticised the latest food-labelling scheme, which tells shoppers how much sugar, fat and salt products contain as a percentage of their total 'guideline daily amount'.

Tesco, Morrisons, Walkers, Kellogg's and Nestle have been introducing the guideline daily amount labels since last year and are now staging a ￡4 million campaign to publicise this as a better alternative to the Government's traffic-light scheme (which uses red, amber and green logos to identify if a food is high, medium or low in fat, sugar and salt).

Guideline daily amount campaign director Jane Holdsworth says the scheme is easier to understand than the traffic-light warnings developed and approved by the Food Standards Agency. But the National Heart Forum says guideline daily amounts are prone to misinterpretation.

"Some manufacturers even appear to be manipulating the labels to promote their products rather than inform," says Jane Landon, National Heart Forum deputy chief executive. Complaints have centred on the fact that some labels feature unrealistically small serving sizes, while others list amounts for adults on products clearly marketed at children.

But guideline daily amount labelling is not the only way food labels can con consumers. Terms such as 'goodness', 'wholegrain' and 'light' don't have to abide by a specific legal definition — in fact, the term light could refer to a product's colour.

Likewise, claims that a food is 'high in fibre', 'heart healthy' or 'natural' can all be misleading. Even supposedly healthy-eating ranges are guilty of manipulating terms to make their products seem lower in fat and calories than they really are, says Miranda Watson, a spokesman for the Which? labelling campaign.

So what is the best approach to shopping healthily? Although the traffic-light system has also attracted criticism -- opponents claim no food should feature a red flag warning as nothing is so bad that it should be avoided altogether --Watson says: 'We would definitely recommend the traffic-light warning system, which is simple to follow.'

Here, we take a look at what is really in a basket of healthy-sounding foods, and ask dietician Louise Sutton for her expert verdict on the truth behind the claims.