Legislate food labeling and stop misleading consumers!

BANT 2024 electoral manifesto – A call for change! – Current gaps in labelling mean that consumers are often misled about the true nutritional values ​​and high fat, salt and sugar (HFSS) content of the products they buy. Food labels are supposed to inform and make purchasing decisions easier, but confusion is greater than ever.

BANT is calling for food labeling legislation to ensure consistent declaration of all ingredients for the benefit of consumers.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) definition for food labels is to “provide consumers with nutritional information at a glance, so they can make informed food choices, balance their diet and control their energy (calorie) intake.”

Yet a 2021 FSA report showed that trust and interpretability of nutrition labelling systems are low, and that “consumers may be very distrustful of the labelling system and question whether it is reliable in providing accurate information on nutritional details, and this may also have a cultural dimension”.

So food labels are not serving the purpose for which they were designed. Why? Because they cannot be trusted.

A new report from the World Health Organization (WHO) called for “strict regulation to curb the power of industry,” suggesting that ultra-processed foods (UPF), alcohol, tobacco and fossil fuels kill up to 2.7 million people each year in Europe. They are calling on those in political power to actively lobby for health policies that are regularly “challenged, delayed, weakened or stopped” by commercial industry.

Food labeling is one such policy that is under constant attack from industry.

Lack of consistency in food labeling has allowed food manufacturers to continue to deceive consumers. The industry continues to use modified starches, such as maltodextrins, to replace fats and facilitate “low-calorie” claims, as well as non-nutritive sweeteners to replace sugars. Neither are classified as sugars, although they behave similarly. This misleads consumers into believing they are buying “healthier” alternatives and makes it difficult to calculate true glycemic effects – the rate at which a food raises blood sugar – from just reading the food label. This is particularly relevant for people living with metabolic conditions such as obesity, type 2 diabetes mellitus, high cholesterol and fatty liver disease.

BANT calls on political parties to:

● Commit to mandatory food labelling with clear guidance on products high in fat, salt and sugar (HFSS) to close loopholes that allow manufacturers to present non-nutritive sweeteners as healthy alternatives to sugar and modified starches (corn, wheat or potato) as ‘low calorie’.

● Introduce a single labelling framework to make it easier for consumers to compare products that all manufacturers must adhere to.

● Update UK Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition (SACN) guidelines to align with those of the World Health Organisation.

Download the full manifesto here or access our online flipbook.