Do food claims improve consumer health, asks BNF
According to the new National Diet and Nutrition Survey (NDNS), UK consumers are still not meeting intake guidelines for fibre, omega-3 and some essential vitamins and minerals in their diets.
“The survey provides some good news but also emphasises that further improvements are required if guidelines are to be met,” writes BNF director general Professor Judith Buttriss in the foundation’s latest Nutrition Bulletin.
On-pack food composition data and signposting, nutrition claims and health claims have an important role to play, she writes.
“Studies performed in a number of European countries are demonstrating that people can understand and use this information to make informed choices about products on the supermarket shelves. The challenge is to help and motivate consumers to translate this ability into long-term improvements in food choice behaviour, through which benefits in diet quality can be achieved.”
Regulatory inconsistencies
The article – entitled Are health claims and functional foods a route to improving the nation’s health? – highlights that claims on food products to have the potential to help direct shoppers towards healthier choices. However, it also points out there are still questions and inconsistencies surrounding Europe’s nutrition and health claims regulation.
Aside from the “sketchy” details for the substantiation requirements of health claims provided by the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) at the outset of the claims evaluation process, Professor Buttriss also identifies certain inconsistencies between the EU regulation and Codex Alimentarius.
One inconsistency concerns ‘source’ claims for vitamins and minerals, she writes.
“For liquids, Codex uses 7.5 per cent of the RDA (instead of the 15 per cent used in the Regulation for both solids and liquids) and Codex also allows 5 per cent RDA per 100 kcal.”
There is also a lack of consistency when making ‘reduced’ or ‘increased’ nutrient claims. To make a ‘reduced’ or ‘increased’ claim under the Regulation there has to be a reduction or increase in the nutrient of at least 30 per cent, whereas Codex applies a figure of 25 per cent, writes Professor Buttriss. Furthermore, the Regulation does not allow claims for smaller reductions, for example a 10 per cent reduction in salt or fat, and this does not support the stepwise reduction in these nutrients.
“Discussions are underway regarding whether the Regulation might be amended to make it consistent with Codex and to be more supportive of efforts to reformulate products to make them more healthy, such as allowing nutrition claims to be made where there has been a reduction of at least 10 per cent (e.g. in salt or saturated fatty acids) and enabling ‘temporary’ claims (such as ‘now contains 50 per cent less saturated fat’) to be made following replacement of a product by a healthier alternative.”
EFSA health claims dialogue
Yesterday, EFSA held a day-long health claims summit at its Parma headquarters, where 250 industry representatives gathered in the hope of gleaning more information on the risk assessor’s approach to claims dossiers.
To read the NutraIngredients.com report on the summit, click here.
