A wake-up call for nutrition labelling.

In 2011, the European Union issued a new regulation on the provision of information on food for consumers (1). The regulation includes new directives for the provision of nutrition information on processed foods. In response, a number of food manufacturers and retailers recently committed themselves to harmonize the nutrition information on their products (2). In the USA in 2011, the Institute of Medicine published its recommendations for front-of-package labelling (3) , and almost simultaneously the Grocery Manufacturers Association and Food Marketing Institute introduced their own labelling scheme (4). In October 2012, the UK announced a voluntary front-of-package labelling scheme to be in place by summer 2013 (5). The issue of nutrition labelling has clearly been on a slow simmer for the past several years. This month's issue of Public Health Nutrition contains various papers that deal with nutrition labelling. The findings shed more light on how consumers perceive and use different systems. In an experimental study, Goodman et al. (6) report how the presence of a front-of-package label effectively triggered consumers to select products with a lower sodium content in Canada. The study showed that a traffic light label with the most information (i.e. colour indications, sodium per serving size and percentage of daily values) was preferred over the less detailed ones. The findings from a large cohort of French adults confirm consumer preference for the multiple traffic light system with basic nutritional information relative to four other front-of-package labels (7). Interestingly, the positive perceptions towards the multiple traffic light system were characterized by a consumer profile with somewhat higher nutrition knowledge and reported use of the nutrition information on labels. The study also clearly shows how each perception pattern of nutrition labelling was associated with a distinct socioeconomic profile, indicating how labels are perceived differently by different consumers. To assess in more detail how consumers look at nutrition information on food labels, van der Merwe et al. (8) evaluate whether consumers could locate nutrition and health information on a label in South Africa. Although most consumers were able to read the labels correctly, they had more difficulties understanding the nutritional and health significance of the messages. The authors point out that the sample consisted of a better-educated group of adults and conclude that basic nutrition knowledge is a precondition for correct identification of information on a label. Watson et al. (9) confirm this finding. Their study investigated how Australian …