How does the UK nutrition "Traffic Light System" work?
I have been trying to understand the UK "Traffic Light" system of labelling food nutrition as a helpful guide to maintaining a healthy diet and to focus this question on one nutrient, I am concentrating on saturated fats.
The UK guidelines state that the RDA for saturated fats is 30g per day for men and 20g per day for women.
If you take the following labels I have photographed, they are confusing.
Note that each pack is a portion size pack
The top one is a pack of sandwiches (2 slices of bread, with filling, cut in half), the bottom one is a "crunch mix" snack.
How can one of these be low on saturates at 2.2g per portion (11% RDA) when the other pack is "medium level" at 1.2g per portion (6% RDA and 55% of the "low" pack)?
Best Answer
With much government information they do not like to give us firm details of what they do. I have failed to find details of how they do it [1], but one way they could would be to assume a person ate only this, and see how much saturated fat they would eat. The top is 398kcal and 2.2g sat fat, the bottom 159 kcal and 1.2g sat fat. If one ate 2,000 kcals worth of the top you would get 11g of saturated fat, and of the bottom 15g saturated fat. This could indicate that the bottom is worse than the top.
[1] The closest I found was the last page of this document, but that states for sturated fat the limits are low < 1.5g < medium < 5g < high but this is not consistent with your images.
Pictures about "How does the UK nutrition "Traffic Light System" work?"
How does the traffic light system on food work?
The traffic light label is colour coded and shows that green is low in a particular nutrient, amber means medium and red is high in a nutrient. Red means the product is high in a nutrient and you should try to cut down, eat less often or eat smaller amounts.How accurate is nutritional information UK?
Currently there is no specific law about how accurate the information on food labels should be - they need only show average nutrition values. These can be worked out in different ways, none of which is 100% reliable.How does traffic light Labelling help consumers with food choices?
The traffic light system helps consumers who feel that they are struggling to resist unhealthy food. Another study from Germany published in 2014 in the International Journal of Consumer Studies found that the traffic light labelling system made it significantly more likely that customers would choose low-fat products.How do you read a nutrition label UK?
Colour-coded nutritional information tells you at a glance if the food has high, medium or low amounts of fat, saturated fat, sugars and salt: red means high. amber means medium. green means low.Label reading - traffic light system
More answers regarding how does the UK nutrition "Traffic Light System" work?
Answer 2
I suspect that the issue is that the numbers are ‘per pack’ while the colors are per some other concept, possibly a ‘serving’, with the upper product having more than one serving per pack.
If you look at the information below the colors, it gives kCalories per 100g. From this we can determine one is a roughly 200g package while the other is labeled as being 30g. So the lower package would have significantly more saturated fat in an equal measure of the products by weight.
Sources: Stack Exchange - This article follows the attribution requirements of Stack Exchange and is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
Images: Daria Shevtsova, Daria Shevtsova, Pixabay, Pixabay