Dispatches from the CIAA Congress
Science needed to plug trust gap between traditional use and opinions
Speaking on a panel on a panel discussing trust in the European food chain at the CIAA Congress in Brussels on Friday, Geslain-Lanéelle, executive director of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) said: “Obviously the claim rejection is not always because of the absence of scientific basis but because the data were insufficient. We expect some claims to come back.”
Geslain-Lanéelle’s remarks were made in response to a question from FoodNavigator.com about how the gap between trust in science and trust in traditional knowledge may be bridged, given that some negative opinions have been published on foods that have a long traditional association with health.
For example, the latest batch of article 13.1 health claims included a rejection of the long-standing association between prunes and bowl function due to insufficient evidence. Other rejections that may cause surprise from the traditional use perspective include the link between cranberry consumption and reduction in urinary tract infections.
She pointed out that EFSA is operating in a regulatory framework that says it has to consider “not traditional knowledge or what your grandmother thinks, but if it has been substantiated by scientific evidence”.
“The regulation is very demanding and says claims must be supported by general science. Because consumers use claims to build their diets, they must have general science behind them.”
Rejected claim = false claim?
On the first day of the congress Monique Goyens of consumer group BEUC said that that the nutrition and health claims regulation is welcome because it is “high time something happened about the lots of false and misleading information circulated by the food industry”.
She said that considering EFSA has rejected 80 per cent of health claims analysed, 80 per pent of claims in the market have no scientific evidence. “That’s huge. There is a lot of misleading information out there.”
Goyens urged quick action to curb misleading information, and swift development of nutrient profiling system to ensure that health claims are not made on intrinsically unhealthy products.
