Nutritional labelling to promote healthier consumption and purchasing of food or drinks

  • Home / Nutritional labelling to promote healthier consumption and purchasing of food or drinks

Nutritional labelling to promote healthier consumption and purchasing of food or drinks

New
Authors: 
Crockett RA, King SE, Marteau TM, Prevost AT, Bignardi G, Roberts NW, Stubbs B, Hollands GJ, Jebb SA

A poor diet including excessive energy intake is an important cause of ill health. Nutritional labelling may help people to make healthier food choices.

What is the aim of this review?

This review investigated whether nutritional labels (i.e. labels providing information about nutritional content) persuade people to buy or consume different (healthy) kinds of food. We searched for all available evidence to answer this question and found 28 studies.

Key messages

There is evidence to suggest that nutritional labelling, with energy information (e.g. calorie counts) on menus, may reduce energy purchased in restaurants, but more high-quality studies are needed to make this finding more certain.

What was studied in the review?

Some studies assessed buying food or drinks from vending machines, grocery stores, restaurants, cafeterias, or coffee shops. Others assessed the amount of food or drink consumed during a snack or meal in an artificial setting or scenario (referred to as laboratory studies or settings).

What are the main results of the review?

Nutritional labelling on restaurant menus reduced the amount of energy (i.e. calories) purchased, but the quality of the three studies that contributed to this finding was low, so our confidence in the effect estimate is limited and may change with further studies. Eight studies assessed this same type of intervention in laboratory settings, but instead of evaluating how much energy participants purchased, these studies evaluated how much energy participants consumed. These studies did not conclusively demonstrate a reduction in energy consumed when menus or foods were labelled, and they were also of low quality.

In addition, six laboratory studies assessed how much energy participants consumed when they were given one food or drink option with or without labels, and five laboratory studies assessed how much energy participants consumed when foods were experimentally labelled as low energy or low fat when they were actually high-energy foods (i.e. mislabelling). Results from these two groups of studies were inconclusive and of low, or in the case of mislabelling studies, very low quality. We found some studies that assessed labelling on vending machines and grocery stores, but their results were not easy to interpret, so we could not use them to inform this review.

How up-to-date is this review?

The evidence is current to 26 April 2017.

About Post Author

Medical CPD & News

The Digitalis CPD trawler searches the web for all the latest news and journals.

Privacy Preference Center

Close your account?

Your account will be closed and all data will be permanently deleted and cannot be recovered. Are you sure?

Are you sure?

By disagreeing you will no longer have access to our site and will be logged out.