The UK Food Standards Agency just commissioned a research contract to study the impact that front-of-pack nutritional labeling has on people's food choices. The goal of this project is to gain an insight into the way in which consumers approach purchasing decisions. Of course, the ultimate goal is to assist consumers in making healthier choices.
The problem is that consumers will be considering labels on individual foods and, as a result, evaluating the merits of products outside the context of the whole diet. The project will look at shoppers' understanding of the main types of front-of-pack nutrition labels used in the UK (traffic lights, Guideline Daily Amounts, and traffic light color-coded GDAs) and how they use them. What the project will not even attempt to determine is how consumers incorporate the front-of-pack nutritional labeling information into the context of their whole diet on a daily basis - which is, of course, the most important change because that is how we derive our nutrition on a daily basis.
The program has the unfortunate potential to focus on the means of communicating information and bits of data while ignoring the greater importance of perspective and context. In other words it has the potential of ignoring the forest by focusing on individual trees.
As an example, a consumer could come across a mayonnaise, or a salad dressing preparation which, by itself, would require a red light on the label. If, however, that dressing encourages the consumer to eat a serving or two of healthy cruciferous vegetables, what decision should the consumer make? Avoid the dressing and the vegetables? Certainly not!
But that is a conclusion one might make if the dressing is taken out of the context of the whole diet. An unintended consequence resulting from a focus on one tree rather than the forest.
It will be interesting to see the results of this research, which will be hopefully available by the end of 2008.
