Food Labelling

Food labelling is a pretty poor way of making people eat more healthily. The idea assumes that people actually read the label – which quite often, they don’t. Reasons for this can vary: consumers might be in a hurry when buying groceries or don’t understand the information. A lot of consumers don’t really care enough about the long-term dangers of eating unhealthily and find it too much of a fuss.

Even if people would read the label, they probably won’t change their behaviour. This is because humans are not very rational: they often sacrifice a longer term benefit for a short term gain. Take a look at smoking: even though everyone knows that smoking is a serious health risk, people still smoke. “Bad choices” may be a result of peer pressure, maybe because they think it looks cool or because they like the kick of the nicotine in the here and now.

The same goes for food: the short term satisfaction of a tasty supersized, extra-fat hamburger will outweigh the longer term health benefits of eating a salad instead. This is all the more so because there are very powerful biological factors leading us to prefer fat, salty or sweet foods. In times of food scarcity these foods are the most essential for our survival because they provide the most energy. Thus after millions of years of evolution, we’ve become hard-wired to prefer salty, sweet and fatty foods.

But even if people would read the label and are rational enough to change their behaviour, they probably won’t understand the information on the label. For example, what is the difference between saturated fat and trans fat, and why is that relevant? What are “carbohydrates” and are they good or bad? Is what is healthy for an elderly person also good for an active, growing teenager? Being able to understand what’s in your food requires a lot of specialist knowledge which the average consumers doesn’t have.

Putting labels on food packages may actually have a bad impact on diet. In Michael Pollan’s words, what people should be doing is: “Eat Food. Mostly Plants. Not too much”. And they should be cooking food themselves, from fresh, raw ingredients – they shouldn’t be having a lot of processed, packaged foods made in factories. Labels that suggest that certain processed foods are in some way healthy may actually push people away from cooking from scratch, which would almost always be better for them.

The Traffic Light system is the worst way to provide consumers with health information. The colours are unnecessarily judgemental: they suggest for example that even the smallest bag of crisps is inherently “bad” – which it isn’t. One small bag doesn’t lead to serious negative health effects. Moreover, it leads to misunderstanding. In reality, it’s not the amount of fat, salt or sugar that every serving of food contains that makes you unhealthy – it’s the amount of fat, sugar and salt that you consume over an entire day that counts. But when one bag of crisps is coded “orange” and another is coded “red”, you might take home the orange one, but you are very likely to take home more than just one, because you believe them to be “healthier”.

The GDA-system is the worst way to provide health information, because it is takes more time to read and understand it. Purchasing decisions are made in a split second, and reading the GDAs costs too much time. Moreover, there is a risk that consumers interpret the GDA as a target instead of a maximum, encouraging them to eat more instead of less salt, fat and sugars. Lastly, it assumes that consumers are good enough at Maths to be able to add up all the percentages over the day and decide at the end if they’ve had too much or not. Most consumers aren’t up to this, and even if they are, they’ll probably wouldn’t like the hassle of counting every calorie.

Even if it would generate all the benefits of both systems and leave out all of the disadvantages, consider the amount of information that one label now has to carry. That amount of information will never fit on, let’s say, a candybar. Moreover, it will deliver mixed messages: a small portion of food could be coded red but still contribute only a very small percentage to your GDA – what should a consumer decide? And is it fair to ask producers to do all this work when we’re not sure the consumer even understands it?