Food standards and nutrition.

The Food and Drugs Act 1955 This Act contains a number of general provisions that relate directly or indirectly to nutrition. Section I provides that no person shall add anything to or abstract anything from food, or subject food to any other process or treatment, so as to render it injurious to health. Section 2 makes it an offence to sell food to the prejudice of the purchaser that is not of the nature, substance or quality demanded. Section 6 prohibits the use of labels or advertisements that falsely describe a food or are calculated to mislead as to quality, which is expressly stated to include ‘nutritional or dietary value’. It is no defence to include in such labels or advertisements an accurate statement of the composition of the food; thus a label or advertisement can be at the same time misleading and accurate. Sections 4 and 7 empower the making of regulations relating to the composition and description of food. It might be supposed that these widely drawn provisions would be sufficient to protect the public interest and in fact a Departmental Committee reported nearly forty years ago that there was no evidence that a lack of specific food standards had resulted in malnutrition (Ministry of Health, 1938). However, experience has shown that effective enforcement can be very difficult in the absence of regulations which specify more closely the standards of composition, description, labelling and advertising of food that are required in order to comply with the general provisions of the Act. The difficulty that a lay bench might have in adjudicating on nutritional problems, possibly in the face of conflicting expert evidence, can be imagined. Standards have therefore been established by subordinate legislation under the Act in order to avoid the confusion and uncertainty among consumers, enforcement authorities and manufactures alike that might otherwise prevail.