Nutrition experts: the Nutri-Score is keeping people ignorant
Last year, there was still a lot of fuss about the Nutri-Score, the letter appearing on more and more products in supermarkets, intended to let you see at a glance whether you’re making a healthy choice or not. The Nutri-Score is now being introduced nationwide, but confusion among consumers remains widespread, because how on earth can a frozen pizza (surprise: often not that healthy) get a B rating?
Nutri-Score
With Nutri-Score, you can see at a glance which products within a product group have a healthier composition. The food choice logo translates the nutritional value of products into a clear letter and colour code. A is dark green and appears on products with the healthiest composition within a product group. Score E is red and appears on products from the same product group with the least healthy composition.
In any case, there is a very large group of food producers making ‘honest’ products that can be seriously disadvantaged by these labels. Parmesan cheese and Iberian ham, for example, and Roquefort, which, much to the anger of traditional cheesemakers, received a worse score than chicken nuggets (!!)…
The Nutri-Score is keeping you ignorant
But what some experts also find troubling is that people are being given an ‘excuse’ not to think about their diet and eating habits for themselves anymore. If, for example, you eat one of those frozen pizzas with a B rating every day, you’re not exactly making good choices, are you?
According to food scientist IJsbrand Velzeboer, consumers are being kept ignorant in this way. He believes people would be better off learning something about what is in their food instead of merely learning to interpret a picture with coloured markings.
Frozen pizza
According to Frank Lindner of food watchdog Foodwatch (which uses the aforementioned undesirable daily frozen-pizza scenarios as an example), despite the confusion caused by products being compared ‘only’ within a particular product group, there is also something positive about the situation.
If you were already planning to buy a sweet dessert, then when you stand in front of that shelf, you can at least see which quark or custard is slightly healthier than another product on the shelf. Until recently, that was far from transparent.
Albert Heijn strongly supports Nutri-Score
Despite all the controversy, Nutri-Score will nevertheless become the leading system intended to help people in the Netherlands make healthier food choices. State Secretary Maarten van Ooijen (VWS) informed the House of Representatives by letter about the nationwide introduction of the Nutri-Score food choice logo in the Netherlands. Albert Heijn is a strong supporter of Nutri-Score and has been running various pilots since 2019. The supermarket chain sees it as a valuable addition to existing nutritional information and has already made Nutri-Score visible on 6,000 digital price tags; on ah.nl, customers can also filter products by Nutri-Score.
Read also:
- Craving pizza? In Rome, you can just pull one out of the wall
- Healthy? Think again!
- Toxic substance in Skittles, Mars taken to court
Source: NOS, Albert Heijn, image: Albert Heijn
