Read To Buy Or Pay For Ill-Health

Today’s shopping centres and the traditional markets are replete with many and diverse food products, some of which are pre-packaged. Considering the central place of nutrition in our health, food selling hubs are essentially health hubs. They are places that can drive healthy food choices made by consumers or market food products that undermine health.

Pre-packaged food products provide the medium by which the nutritional composition, their quantities and health implication, among others can be declared so that consumers can be informed to shape their food choices. This is called food labelling. The information getting to the buyer of the food product rests on reading the information on the food products, understanding what is read, and making healthy choices so that consumers will not be paying for and consuming products that become detrimental to their health. Within the bigger picture, different factors come to play in this regard.

Food label is a scheme that is supposed to be declared by manufacturers of food in the context of commerce in their quest to target consumers. Food labelling can be traced to the Roman Empire, where the containers of diverse foods were marked to indicate their quality and place of origin. The evolution of food labelling continued throughout the medieval period to safeguard the health of the public. Food labelling has been shaped significantly by various socio-economic forces of the modern world. Globally, there is a move towards more mandatory forms of food labels.

Broadly, the types of food labels include Back-of-Pack Labelling (BOPL) and Front-of-Pack Labelling (FOPL). BOPL has the details of the food products at the back of the package. It contains more details that may seem very technical to certain section of the population. BOPL has been in use long before, FOPL was rolled out. FOPL gives simplified information about the nutritional composition and warnings about their impact on health. The World Health Organization advised its members to add FOPL to the already existing BOPL to augment how food labels shape consumers’ idea of the healthfulness of food products and their decision to buy and consume them.

With the realization of the important role that FOPL can play in positively shaping the food environment towards improved healthy food choices, diverse types of FOPL have been developed to fit various local contexts. Some of the popular ones include, but not limited to, Warning Label, Traffic Lights Labelling, Health Star Rating, Nutri-Score Labelling, and KeyHole Labelling developed by Chile, Britain, New Zealand, Australia, France, and Scandinavian countries. Others include the Guideline Daily Amount, 5-Color Nutrition Label, and Green Tick Label.

FOPL has been broadly classified as interpretive and reductive. The reductive FOPLs provide nutritional facts such as the amount of relevant nutrients within food products, whilst interpretive FOPLs satisfy the format of reductive FOPLs but also include the use of colors and arts to indicate the healthfulness of the food product. FOPL has had a large endorsement, having been deemed as very effective in guiding patients’ knowledge about food nutrients on pre-packed food products.

Some jurisdictions are investigating the effectiveness of various FOPL to judge whether to make them mandatory, just like BOPL, which is mandatory in many countries. For instance, in the United Kingdom, BOPL is binding whilst FOPL is voluntary. Other studies attempt to underscore the effectiveness of combining a few of the FOPL. Some studies have indicated the relevance of chromatic touch to FOPL or colourful FOPL.

Ghana is currently developing a FOPL scheme that will be adopted for food products manufactured in Ghana. Meanwhile, at the moment, as mentioned earlier, there are uncountable number of food products on the Ghanaian market, many of which are imported from other countries with their own labeling scheme. We must be abreast of this reality.

The relevance of building a food label reading culture cannot be overemphasized. It is a critical step in deciding to buy and going on to pay for food products. One would not want to go and make payment for food products that lead to ill-health for which he or she would have to spend more money to take care of. The next time you get a pre-packed food product from the mall, mart, market or any shopping centre, remember to read the label, ask questions and be critical of the food product before purchasing and consuming it. Read about food labels today.