Is a new nutrition labelling scheme really needed?

This is where the ‘traffic light’ labelling is useful. The other information provided can be ignored or looked at when at home to help consumers decide whether to buy the same product again or maybe make an alternative choice. Some have health problems and for them the nutritional labelling can be valuable.

Maybe they are intending to sneakily reduce product sizes under the guise of standardising portions and healthy eating.

I don’t know how portion sizes are established. Out of interest I have occasionally weighed the amount of muesli that I am about to eat for breakfast. It is generally 85-90g, about twice the portion size shown on most packets. It does not matter if it is home-made muesli or prefabricated commercial stuff.

I presume a portion size in practice will depend upon your age, your sex, your size, the type of work or exercise you undertake, and so on. So how worthwhile would a “standard portion” size be.

Now, we all eat lots of different foods during a single day, and will we look at each meal, each component, work out the intake of the different elements like energy, fats, sugar, salt , saturates? Call me a sceptic but I doubt many except those with particular problems would even bother to try. I have gauged my food intake by what I like, and eaten the amount I wanted, as have all our family and, touch wood, we seem to remain nutritionally OK.

I suspect ‘portion size’ is a smokescreen.

I find nutritional information interesting and useful and as you say, it is important to some with health problems. It can be ignored by others. What I’m suggesting is simply that portion size reflects what people consume. I suspect that most people eat more than the portion sizes shown on manufactured foods. The portion size could be either the average or alternatively the median amount consumed. I don’t know how the current figures are established.

The truth is, the healthiest, most nutrient dense food usually comes without a label or nutritional information. Of course, most of those brands are linked to big pharmaceutical companies, who help devise all these labels and steer the research in favour of their own continued commercial success.

I always think portion size is fairly meaningless.

What sort of person is the portion aimed at, old, young, active, sedentary? How are you supposed to know what constitutes a portion? It might be obvious on some foods, but not all.

What is a portion of breakfast cereal? You probably have more if it is the only thing you eat or less if you follow it with toast. Then there is they type of milk you have with it.

Do you eat a whole moussaka ready meal or share it with someone and have some salad on the side.

It would be interesting to know how useful people find traffic lights other than the indication of the colours and how they use them to control their diet. What use do they make of all the numbers they are presented with?

Portion sizes can vary according to the amount of physical activity carried out during the day, ones gender and tendency to retain water (more common in women) and ones propensity to avariciousness. Food and drink, especially that containing large amounts of refined sugar can also be highly addictive. When this happens your addiction takes control over your mind, your thought processes and all good intentions are abandoned.

The answer is (if you haven’t already done so) to invest in some accurate bathroom scales and make it a routine to jump on them every morning upon rising and then increase or decrease the size of your portions according to your desired weight, if you have one.

Too much exercise can make you more hungry and you can end up eating even more so that exercise is then increased leading to dependency and, as with food or drink, in susceptible people, anorexia, bulimia or alcoholism.

Traffic lights are an essential and useful guide to inform you of the content of the food you are eating and especially for people with existing health problems, but it’s up to each individual (adult) to control the amount they consume and perhaps, more importantly, that of their children.

Tricky, that; you’d need to define what you mean by ‘too much exercise’ and I’m not sure that even top athletes succumb to “anorexia, bulimia or alcoholism.” very often. We don’t yet really understand the mechanisms of addiction, so I suspect it’s a tad unwise to suggest the fervent exercisers among us are heading down the greasy slope to a life of hopeless addiction. And the ‘susceptible’ rarely seem to require excessive exercise to enter the cycle of dependency.

As for portion size, I suspect it’s simply a way for the companies that make less than nutritious offerings to confuse the situation. Malcolm, I think it was, said “Just don’t buy stuff with unhealthy contents would be one way of dealing with this.”. I agree. One portion of deep fried bacon is likely to be less healthy than one portion of mixed salad.

Maybe having more exercise than usual encourages overeating. I notice this when I’m on holiday, especially if combined with eating late.

It certainly make you hungrier, obviously, but over-eating is a different issue, I suspect.

Ian, it’s impossible for me to define how much exercise is good for one person and not another except to say that exercise in moderation is no bad thing. It is, on the other hand, very wise for people (adults) first to be made aware of the general guidelines (not to be interpreted as a formality) so that they are free to choose to follow them or not. That is everyone’s prerogative.

Definition of guidelines
1). A non specific rule or principle that provides direction to action or behaviour
2). A plan or explanation to guide one in setting standards or determining a course of action.

Definition of susceptible
1). Likely or liable to be influenced or harmed by a particular thing.
2). Vulnerable, an easy target, defenceless, naive, gullible.

Scientific studies are making huge progress in relation to addiction, and in particular how dopamine interacts with another neurotransmitter glutamate in the brain. See: help guide.org – Understanding Addiction – How Addiction Hi-jacks the Brain. (Adapted with permission from a Harvard Health Publication Letter.)

How relevant this info is to the importance of food labelling is debatable, but I believe consumers have a right to know the amount of any potential harmful substances contained in their food that can have an adverse effect on their general health and wellbeing.

But Beryl, you stated ‘Too much exercise…’ which means you would have to have a baseline figure in mind in the first place, surely? You can’t really have too much of something unless you have an idea of what constitutes the right amount. When you then go on to imply “it can lead to dependency and, as with food or drink, in susceptible people, anorexia, bulimia or alcoholism. ” I think that’s an unwise conclusion.

I buy ‘fresh’ soups in supermarkets. I might only look at the ‘traffic light’ labels in the shop but have looked at the detail at home. I would prefer our Food Standards Agency to make the decisions and the manufacturers to comply.

I do wish they would standardise things like tomato ketchup that can be listed as gm or ml. For a diabetic, gms is the most useful.

It is interesting that neither John or wavechange looked at the numbers on the traffic lights.

Personally I find them confusing and too much time required to work them out when I have maybe 20 other items to buy,

I wonder whether this is a national issue, or whether the EU would be involved? I would expect, if the UK go it alone, for the FSA, manufacturers and nutritionists to work together to produce a sensible outcome. However I doubt whether portion size – average or median, or any other “representative” figure – would be of value to most. I’d stick with values per 100g or 100ml for example and if people really do want or need to work out the numbers they can relate this to the size of portion they will take out of the pack.

I certainly do look at the numbers on the ‘traffic lights’, Alfa, but that often waits until I’m home. I don’t want to stay in a supermarket longer than necessary. Using the numbers helps me decide whether to buy a product again.

For most liquids, g and ml are approximately the same, an exception being oils and anything with a high content of oil. I have suggested before that we could replace ml with g but others disagreed.

Ian, I repeat it is possible to have too much exercise. Read the link I posted.

They might be making portion sizes smaller so that will make them healthier. 😉

Coca-Cola, Mars, Nestlé, Pepsico, Unilever and Mondelez are not names usually associated with healthy foods, so you might be right, William.

Just don’t buy stuff with unhealthy contents would be one way of dealing with this.

“Healthy” is not everyone’s sole criterion for buying eatables. They also by things to consume for other reasons – enjoyment being one. Alcohol, chocolate, sweets, cake, sausages, bacon…………………….for example. Advice on what to eat is one thing but we all have the freedom to then do as we please (fortunately).

Chocolate has some very healthy attributes. The rest….less so.

Definitely. Low salt too, except that some of it isn’t these days.

What’s next? Sugar in soup? No we have that already. 🙁

They can all have benefits, but the point is how much of them you consume.