A new study in India has found that warning labels on food packets are most effective in helping consumers identify foods high in sugar, saturated fat and sodium as compared to other labelling formats.
Published in open access journal Nutrients earlier this month, the study is the first peer-reviewed paper on the subject in an Indian context. It found that on most parameters, the Health Star Rating (HSR) format—where a product is assigned between 1/2 a star and five stars—was least effective. The study comes at a time the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI) is expected to issue its draft regulation on front-of-package labelling (FOPL) and has indicated that it favours HSR, earning the ire of public health experts who have accused it of favouring the food industry.
The authors conducted an in-person randomised experiment on 2,869 adults in six States in India, where participants were shown food packets with one of five FOPLs—a control label (barcode), nutrient-specific warning label (octagon symbol indicating whether the product was high in salt/sugar or saturated fat), Health Star Rating, guideline for daily amount (GDA that gives nutritional content information) or traffic light label (indicating red, amber or green levels of nutrients of concern). The objective of the study was to evaluate the impact of different labels in helping consumers correctly identify packaged products containing excess levels of nutrients of concern such as sugar, saturate fat and sodium.
