| I've still got loads to do for our report on nutritional food labels. |
| Me too. |
| What did you learn from doing the project about your own shopping habits? |
| Well, I've always had to check labels for traces of peanuts in everything I eat because of my allergy. |
| But beyond that I've never really been concerned enough to check how healthy a product is. |
| This project has actually taught me to read the labels much more carefully. |
| I tended to believe claims on packaging like 'low in fat'. |
| But I now realise that the 'healthy' yoghurt I've bought for years is full of sugar |
| and that it's actually quite high in calories. |
| Ready meals are the worst... |
| comparing the labels on supermarket pizzas was a real eye-opener. |
| Did you have any idea how many calories they contain? |
| I was amazed. |
| Yes, because unless you read the label really carefully, |
| you wouldn't know that the nutritional values given are for half a pizza. |
| When most people eat the whole pizza. |
| Not exactly transparent is it? |
| Not at all. |
| But I expect it won't stop you from buying pizza? |
| Probably not, no! |
| I thought comparing the different labelling systems used by food manufactures was interesting. |
| I think the kind of labelling system used makes a big difference. |
| Which one did you prefer? |
| I liked the traditional daily value system best - |
| the one which tells you what proportion of your required daily intake of each ingredient the product contains. |
| I'm not sure it's the easiest for people to use but at least you get the full story. |
| I like to know all the ingredients in a product - |
| not just how much fat, salt and sugar they contain. |
| But it's good supermarkets have been making an effort to provide reliable information for customers. |
| Yes. There just needs to be more consistency between labelling systems used by different supermarkets, |
| in terms of portion sizes, etc. |
| The labels on the different brands of chicken flavour crisps were quite revealing too, weren't they? |
| Yeah. |
| I don't understand how they can get away with calling them chicken flavour |
| when they only contain artificial additives. |
| I know. |
| I'd at least have expected them to contain a small percentage of real chicken. |
| Absolutely. |
| I think having nutritional food labeling has been a good idea, don't you? |
| I think it will change people's behaviour and stop mothers, in particular, buying the wrong things. |
| But didn't that study kind of prove the opposite? |
| People didn't necessarily stop buying unhealthy products. |
| They only said that might be the case. |
| Those findings weren't that conclusive and it was quite a small-scale study. |
| I think more research has to be done. |
| Yes, I think you're probably right. |
| What do you think of the traffic-light system? |
| I think supermarkets like the idea of having a colour-coded system - |
| red, orange or green - for levels of fat, sugar and salt in a product. |
| But it's not been adopted universally. |
| And not on all products. |
| Why do you suppose that is? |
| Pressure from the food manufacturers. |
| Hardly surprising that some of them are opposed to flagging up how unhealthy their products are. |
| I'd have thought it would have been compulsory. |
| It seems ridiculous it isn't. |
| I know. |
| And what I couldn't get over is the fact that it was brought in without enough consultation - |
| a lot of experts had deep reservations about it. |
| That is a bit weird. |
| I suppose there's an argument for doing the research now when consumers are familiar with this system. |
| Yeah, maybe. |
| The participants in the survey were quite positive about the traffic-light system. |
| But I don't think they targeted the right people. |
| They should have focused on people with low literacy levels |
| because these labels are designed to be accessible to them. |
| Yeah. |
| But it's good to get feedback from all socio-economic groups. |
| And there wasn't much variation in their responses. |
| No. |
| But if they hadn't interviewed participants face-to-face, |
| they could have used a much bigger sample size. |
| I wonder why they chose that method? |
| Dunno. |
| How were they selected? |
| Did they volunteer or were they approached? |
| I think they volunteered. |
| The thing that wasn't stated was how often they bought packaged food - |
| all we know is how frequently they used the supermarket. |