"Good food/bad food" winning out over "good diet/bad diet"
Used to be all dietitians would chant the mantra of varied diets where all foods could find a place. "We need to focus on the question of "good diets" and "bad diets," they'd say, and avoid labeling individual foods as "good foods" or "bad foods."
The science is unchanged, but the mantra is gone. When nutrition experts gather these days, they're shaking their heads and wringing their hands: the public doesn't "get it." While consumers pretty well understand the concepts of the dietary guidelines, they don't buy into them in terms of personal eating decisions. What to do?
Demonize foods, say some like the Center for Science in the Public Interest which has pushed the "good food/bad food" dichotomy for 30 years. Make people feel that the foods they eat are poisoning them. Ostracize foods with "bad" nutrients and limit diet choices to "good foods" with plentiful "good" nutrients.
The food industry is buying into the "good foods/bad foods" story too -- for marketing reasons. Food companies want to deliver what their customers want. If you can put a "healthy" label on your foods, it makes a difference in product placement and sales -- if you can make it taste good!
A new study reported by the European Food Information Council sums up this way:
There is widespread interest for nutrition information on food packages. Consumers generally understand the link between food and health, and many are interested in using information about the nutritional properties of the food they eat. However, the degree of interest differs between consumers and varies across situations and products. In addition, it can conflict with other interests in food, notably taste, traditional eating, and indulgence.
Consumers like the idea of simplified front-of-pack information but differ in their liking for the various formats. These include health logos, 'traffic lights', GDA-based systems and energy labels. Differences can be related to conflicting preferences for ease of use, being fully informed, and not being pressurised into behaving in a particular way. For example, many consumers like colour coding, but some regard reds and greens on food products as too coercive.
Most consumers understand the most common signposting formats in the sense that they themselves believe that they understand them and they can replay key information presented to them in an experimental situation.
There is still virtually no insight into how labelling information is, or will be, used in a real world shopping situation, and how it will affect consumers' dietary patterns.
The real question is will food buyers follow the red-yellow-green stoplight the same way they follow traffic speed limits -- by applying their own judgment in the absence of an officer writing speeding tickets? As EUFIC points out: "There is still virtually no insight into how labelling information is, or will be, used in a real world shopping situation." Are we ready to buy another set of unintended consequences?
