Supporting consumer choice

Reducing people’s intake of salt has been one of the Agency’s main campaigns in recent years and as 75% of the salt we eat is already in the food that we buy, the Agency has also been working with the food industry to reduce the levels of salt in foods like bacon, ham, cheese, bread, breakfast cereals and ready meals –­ with some considerable reductions having already been achieved.

Unfortunately, we haven’t had a breakthrough on every product. The salt and health campaigning group CASH (Consensus Action on Salt and Health) have been looking at Delia Smith’s most recent book and TV series – 'How to Cheat at Cooking' – which encourages people to cook meals using ready prepared foods, rather than cooking from scratch.  This is, in theory, a really useful concept because it helps us to make tasty meals more quickly, something which is increasingly important in a world where we are all becoming busier and so have less time to cook.

Reading the papers over the last week you couldn’t help but notice that the Italian buffalo mozzarella industry is having a hard time at the moment. High dioxin levels in some buffalo mozzarella from the Campania region of Italy near Naples have led some countries to announce restrictions on the import of this specialty food.

Information for consumers is once again in the news.  This week the FSA Board considered proposals for a national 'scores on doors' scheme to put hygiene scores on display in food premises.

The scheme proposed is aimed at providing information to inform consumers and consumer choice.  But once again there is the debate about whether consumers want information of this type – will they understand it, and what will they do with it.

Despite several years’ experience of Agency press coverage, it still amazes me that a piece of research that was purely to inform our thinking on how a consumer campaign might look further down the line, can lead to total fallacies about the Food Standards Agency planning to slap ‘scary’ labels and pictures on cheese sandwiches! According to The Grocer magazine, we’re asking manufacturers of high saturated fat foods to put cigarette box-style warnings on packs. Vanessa Feltz in the Daily Express takes it one step further, adding that we’ll be plastering pictures of clogged arteries on cheese sandwiches! 

Last night’s Horizon programme on BBC2 raised some very interesting points about some of the health claims made by the food industry. Friendly bacteria, so-called superfoods, and the organics industry all came under the spotlight. It was good to see the programme focusing on the science behind these claims, and interesting that in most cases the science did not appear to back them up.

The Agency has always been keen to ensure that people are not being misled by the various claims made about food. In fact, new European rules were introduced last year aimed at making it easier for people to understand what all these terms mean. In future, any claims made about the nutrition and health benefits of a food will have to be backed up by the science.

'Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants' is the advice of Michael Pollan in his book 'In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto'. See Consuming Passion, Guardian Unlimited, 7 January 2008. I wouldn't disagree. But I do take issue with his view that 'we should junk the science'. Hardly surprising, I suppose, that I should defend science, but surely the problems with 'overnutrition' and obesity are not just the fault of people in white coats dreaming up new ways to deliver fat, sugar and salt to our children? As a parent, I'm no fan of the weird and wonderful foods that entice our children to eat unhealthily any more than I believe that you can get healthy by popping pills or following faddy diets. But surely science can provide us with evidence to help us understand what constitutes a healthy diet, as well as helping us to understand the wider sociological and cultural issues that are influencing our choices. Perhaps then we can start to reverse the trend that, as a nation, we are getting fatter and fatter. Got any views? Have your say on the blog.

The latest survey by local authorities claims there's been an overall decline in salt content of processed foods by 11% since 2005.

Any reduction in salt levels is a welcome development, but there is still more that needs to be done, particularly by some sections of the food industry, to help consumers cut their salt intake.

This week the Agency published the findings of a major survey of the diets of materially-deprived consumers. This has been a huge piece of work, but with our survey partners, the National Centre for Social Research, King's College London and University College London, we have generated an evidence base that will support work here and elsewhere for years to come. 

Understanding the science is always the starting point for us in developing policy on food, but it is, of course, much more complicated than that.  There is a range of other information and evidence that needs to be obtained and analysed in order to develop robust evidence-based food policies.  A key part of this how the science fits in with people's behaviours and preferences and we are trying hard to engage effectively with consumers to find out what they think. 

Today we published the expression of interest to manage our Citizens' Forums on Food. This is a new mechanism we're developing to help us to listen to the views of individual consumers and to hear for ourselves what they think about a range of food issues.

The debate about organic food is in the news again today as a long-term Californian study suggests that organically grown tomatoes contain more of two types of flavonoids, quercetin and kaempferol. The leader of the research, Alyson Mitchell, suggests that this is because non-organic tomatoes are grown with fertiliser that makes nitrogen easily available to the plants. Flavonoids are produced by the plants as a defence mechanism against nutrient deficiency so, she concludes, less are generated when tomatoes are grown in this nitrogen rich soil.

Flavonoids are antioxidants. It has been proposed that they are one of the components present in fruit and vegetables that may be responsible for the relatively low rate of cardiovascular disease that has been associated with high levels of fruit and vegetable consumption. There is, however, not enough evidence to show that increasing intakes of flavonoid rich foods will reduce heart disease, because other factors associated with high fruit and vegetable intakes may be responsible for their cardiovascular protection.