Word: europeanization
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...Faced with such alarming statistics, the European Union, in an attempt to battle the bloc's growing bulge, is mulling drastic changes in the way food products are labeled. The most controversial of the proposals so far is a flashy label backed by health and consumer groups that's based on the colors of a traffic light. Already fixtures in many British supermarkets, the labels use red, yellow and green circles to indicate how healthy products are in four categories: fat, saturated fat, sugar and salt. If a box of cookies is high in sugar, for instance...
...Advocates of the traffic-light proposal in Europe insist that prominent, mandatory labeling is the most effective way to inform consumers. They are backed by a growing body of research. A study this year found that just 17% of European shoppers look for nutritional information when they buy food. Another study showed that although 75% of consumers in France say they are interested in nutrition, a full 84% could not explain what a carbohydrate is. And another study, conducted in Australia last year, indicated that people were five times as likely to identify healthy food options when they see color...
...Dave McCullough, a spokesman for the European Consumers' Organization (BEUC), says that on average, Europeans have about a half hour each week to do all their food shopping. "The fact is that a lot of people do not have time to make decisions on what they are buying," he says. "A housewife out with her three kids wants to make a quick decision while rushing through the supermarket aisles and does not have time for detailed comparison. When we clearly have an obesity epidemic spreading across Europe and when consumers clearly want to make healthier choices about their diet...
...Linda McAvan, a member of the European Parliament from Britain's Labour Party and a supporter of the color-coded food labels, echoes that sentiment. "There is evidence that consumer pressure generated through the traffic-light scheme can lead to product reformulation by retailers," she says. "One major retailer told me how their least healthy sandwich range was phased out when labeling was introduced, as people stopped buying the high-fat and -salt options." (See "Cutting Salt Can Have Big Health Benefits...
...powerful food and drink lobbies and their allies in the European Parliament aren't quite so sure. Renate Sommer, a parliamentarian from Germany's Christian Democratic Union party, favors limiting front-of-package labeling to calorie content and allowing food companies to decide how much nutritional information to list on the back. "It would be wrong to overload consumers. Otherwise you would need a calculator to work out your diet," she says. "The more you label, the less people read. The U.S. has more and more food labeling, but obesity rates keep rising. We should learn from their mistakes...