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Health officials exploring coded food labels
…part of efforts to fight non-communicable diseases
Health officials are considering moving towards a traffic-light colour-coded labelling system for food products, which is gaining popularity across Europe and other places as part of efforts to fight non-communicable diseases (NCDs).
The Traffic-light label is a nutritional labelling scheme designed to help customers help shoppers know at a glance whether a product contains a low, medium or high amount of fat, saturated fat, salt, sugar and calories.
It utilizes the colours red, yellow and green to indicate the content level in a product.
In an interview with Kaieteur News, Minister of Public Health, Volda Lawrence, said that many of the South American countries are implementing this traffic-light coded system for food products.
“It says to customers if you see red it means it has a high content of sugar or fat or some other ingredient that is harmful for your health. If you see amber it means it’s in between and if you see green it means then that this a product that is approved with the amount of saturated fat, amount of salt, sugar. It is an option we are exploring to adopt here,” Lawrence stated.
She explained that essentially, Government will pass regulations that stipulate imported products must have the traffic-code system.
“It comes back to the individual to make the right choices so when a parent goes into the supermarket and picks up a box of juice the parent must be able to make that choice as to what I am going to put into my child’s body,” Lawrence stated.
Minister of Public Health, Volda Lawrence
Examples for traffic light-coded food labels
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), traffic light labelling was pioneered in the United Kingdom (UK).
The idea was first proposed by a medical Non-Governmental Organization (NGO), the Coronary Prevention Group, in the early 1990s. The government agency responsible for food, the Food Standards Agency (FSA), took up the approach in the mid-2000s in light of research that showed that consumers found existing nutritional labelling information complex and difficult to understand.
According to The Guardian, all the main supermarket chains and some of the biggest producers of snack foods in the United Kingdom, such as PepsiCo and Nestlé, have agreed to use front-of-pack nutritional labels coloured red, amber or green on some or all of their products in an effort to make it easier for consumers to choose healthier options.
NCDs such as diabetes, respiratory diseases, cancer and heart diseases have become the greatest challenge to public health. NCDs are known to afflict 57 percent of adults and kill 70 percent of those between 35 and 60 years old. In response to the alarming rates, Guyana has launched a Presidential Commission on NCDs.
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