Recent research from the University of Queensland (UQ) has shown that food labelling is out of step with healthy diet recommendations and could be improved by including nutrient release rates.
Food labelling has been a hot topic in the industry over the past few years, with Food Standards Australia and New Zealand (FSANZ) currently working towards reformation of the system. However, there has been little insight into what the labelling reformation will look like.
According to Emeritus Professor Mike Gidley, at UQ’s Queensland Alliance for Agriculture and Food Innovation, nutrition is currently communicated in two ways, by a food’s nutrient composition and by the diversity of wholefoods in the diet.
“At the moment people pick and choose which of these food languages works best for them, but something is missing,” said Gidley.
“Composition defines nutritional value by the nutrients and calorific energy the food contains, measured against daily consumption targets. Whole food tends to be what health agencies emphasise because that is where the strongest evidence for human health benefits has been found.
“The problem is if you measure food in terms of how much protein, carbs or fat it contains, it’s not enough to judge nutritional value,” he said.
FSANZ’s latest Consumer Insights Tracker (CIT) report revealed 66 per cent of consumers trust FSANZ regulated food labelling, and 71 per cent of consumers felt confident in their ability to use food labelling.
The organisation is currently working towards mandating the front-of-pack Health Star Rating system, which respondents to the CIT survey considered a more accessible form of nutrition labelling than the Nutrition Information Panel (NIP) and Ingredients list.
An overhaul of the NIP to include more relevant information could be an option, based on Gidley’s research. He proposes a system which includes the rate at which an individual component, such as protein, starch, fat, or sugar, is predicted to be delivered to the body.
“Some unhealthy foods have similar compositions to healthy options. Whole foods generally have a slow and steady nutrient release, while nutrients in fabricated ingredient foods are generally more rapidly released, a difference which is not addressed if nutrition value is only based on composition,” said Gidley.
“If we can incorporate nutrient release rates, we can bridge the gap between the two types of nutrition communication.”
Further research is needed before the proposal could become a reality though. Gidley said in his opinion piece, published in Nature Food, that scientists need more data on real people and how they digest their food – which offers a major challenge as it happens dynamically in the body, and needs to be measured non-invasively.
“We need to know not only how quickly nutrients go into us but also how much nourishes our gut microbiota, which is increasingly recognised as playing an important part of human health,” said Gidley.
“Secondly, we need global collaboration to define a standardised analytical method to predict nutrient release from foods using a laboratory method.
“My guess is the first stage would be moving towards a fast, medium or slow kind of classification system. It won’t happen immediately, but without talking about it, nothing will happen, so this proposal is a conversation starter,” he said.
