Ra 4 Food - Health and Nutritional Tips

Campaigners are unhappy about a new change to what is regarded as nutritious food - for example custard tarts, sausage rolls and shock horror - doughnuts - will fall under the category of healthy food.

Cancer Research, the National Heart Foundation and Which? claim the European Commission have set new criteria for food to meet to be deemed healthy or nutritious - and all three of these calorific foods fall into these categories. The three organisations are calling for Health Secretary Alan Milburn to fight the changes, which they are concerned will have major repercussions on fighting obesity.

Three years ago, when the Health Claims Regulation was passed, the EC stated, “Only products offering genuine health or nutritional benefits will be allowed to refer to them on their labels.” However there are significant discrepancies between the new criteria of unhealthy food compared to the one originally created by the Food Standards Agency. The FSA’s traffic labelling system would rate categories like biscuits, meat based products and breakfast cereals with amber or red lights.

Which? criticised certain EU states for trying to shelter traditional foods like salty German bread from being deemed unnutritious under the new legislation.

In an Oxford University analysis of 120 foods in the everyday UK diet it was suggested that a jam doughnut from Tesco which contained 200mg sodium, 18g of sugar and 5.7g of saturated fat per 100g would come under the guidelines of what would be healthy for bakery food as it came under the 500mg sodium, 25g sugar, 8g saturated fat threshold. Included in other categories falling under the threshold and therefore healthy were Sainsbury’s pork sausages, salted Kettle crisps and a Burger King Whopper.

Colin Walker, senior public affairs officer at Which?, said, “Jam doughnuts and crisps being allowed to make nutrition claims would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious. The goalposts have been widened to the point that no one remembers why they were put there in the first place.

“The UK Government needs to get these proposals thrown out and completely rewritten.”