After several experts who signed a petition, the French are in favor of logos indicating the nutritional quality of products on packaging.
Clear logos to identify the quality of food, this is what demands a petition currently online launched by learned societies, professional health associations and consumer associations. The 2,700 signatories defend a labeling system indicating the nutritional quality of the product.
With this request, they are in fact reacting to the resistance of the agrifood industry lobbies concerning a report submitted last January to the Minister of Health. Professor Serge Hercberg proposed in particular “to help consumers to orient their choices at the time of the act of purchase towards food of better nutritional quality and to reduce the pressure of marketing orienting towards the consumption of food of less good nutritional quality. . “An interesting proposition as the French seem today lost in the face of food packaging.
Consumers don’t look at labels
Indeed, in a document published on Wednesday, Inserm experts conducted an analysis of social inequalities in health related to diet and physical activity using data from scientific literature. According to these scientists, most studies show that consumers have a partial understanding of it. They say they use it, but in practice they don’t use it much at the time of purchase. And in Europe, French consumers are the ones who look at nutritional labels the least and understand them the least.
In addition, according to the Health Nutrition Barometer, this low level of understanding worsened between 2002 and 2008. And several studies also point out that the understanding of nutritional labeling is all the less good, and its use is much worse. the less frequent the lower the level of education. Likewise, the more people say they are influenced by price, the less they say they use labeling.
For this Inserm team, “these results therefore suggest that nutritional labeling is likely to increase social inequalities in health, and this all the more so since the most widespread display mode (labeling of nutritional values ) requires consumers to have a minimum of expertise to understand and interpret the information on the packaging of products. “
The use of logos acclaimed by these experts
As regards the logos which differ from the labeling of nutritional values by the fact that they make a value judgment on the nutritional quality of foods, they would be better understood by European consumers than numerical references (nutritional composition tables , RNJ…) according to this analysis. “In fact, it is the combination of logos on the front of packaging and nutrition labeling on the back that would improve the effectiveness of nutritional information and its credibility by consumers,” they say.
Like other studies carried out in Europe, a French survey of healthy volunteers participating in the Nutrinet cohort shows that the Traffic Light Multiple logo which communicates a judgment on the content of several nutrients in the food (a pellet is red, orange or green for each nutrient), is the preferred logo by 58.5% of people compared to other types of logos.
However, the analysis according to social categories leads the authors to conclude that the Traffic Light Simple logo (an overall judgment on the food, i.e. 1 single red or orange or green pellet), would be the logo to be favored because it seems to be better. accepted and understood by those most at nutritional risk, especially those belonging to less advantaged social categories.
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