Food labels are actually affecting your health |
Food labels have far-reaching effects on our health
Our environment drives many of the choices we make around what we eat. Evidence shows that to encourage consumers to make healthier choices, better labelling and education are crucial.
Walk into a standard supermarket and you'll quickly be presented with an array of unhealthy, ultra-processed options which are often too tempting to ignore.
We live in an age of abundance and the average weight of the general population in many countries continues to rise. A key contributor to weight gain has been linked to diets high in ultra-processed foods (UPFs).
What's now increasingly being understood is that the messaging on packing itself influences what we buy and eat. Small changes to labelling can make a surprising difference to what we buy – but equipping ourselves with better knowledge about nutrition can also help us make better choices.
In fact, many leading experts say the food environment – such as the way food is produced, marketed and sold – itself is "obesogenic" (creating the conditions for weight gain) and this influences consumers to make unhealthy choices. To combat the growing levels of obesity, we need to change what we eat – and emerging research shows that behavioural interventions as well as policy change could make a meaningful difference.
By 2050, more than half of adults in the world are predicted to be obese if current trends continue according to a 2025 Lancet paper. If action is taken now, this rapid rise can be prevented but "without immediate and effective intervention, overweight and obesity will continue to increase globally", researchers wrote in the Lancet paper.
But when the food environment itself is part of the problem, much of which is designed to maximise profit, what can be done?
Franco Sassi, a prominent public health researcher at Imperial College London, told me that while individuals feel as though they can choose what they buy and eat, the evidence paints a different picture. "The environment is what determines what you're going to choose. Even if you think that you are in control," he says. This, he says, regularly leads individuals to choose unhealthy options.
How products are marketed to us and where they can be found play a key role in the choices we end up making, he adds. "Everything in our lives is really controlled by what we see in the environment that surrounds us."
Indeed, research has consistently shown that food choices are heavily influenced by our surroundings, affordability and availability.
What makes this particularly troubling is ultra-processed foods (UPFs) are tweaked by manufacturers to make them as irresistible as possible – and, as some increasingly point out, addictive. This is despite the increasing understanding of the link between UPFs and adverse health outcomes – even an early death.
Making this abundantly clear on food labels can and does cause........