Food firms helping Europeans to fight the fat

Europe is getting fatter. Jennifer Rankin reports on industry efforts to curb growing levels of obesity.

For the food industry, Europeans’ expanding waistlines have been the wrong kind of growth figures.

In the ‘old’ EU member states, or EU15, people put away 300 more calories a day than they did in 1970, but do much less exercise, so that half the adult population is judged to be overweight and obesity figures are soaring.

Over the last decade, battle lines have opened up between industry and the public health groups, notably on food labelling and advertising to children. But policy language has converged. Industry, member states, the European Commission and some public-health wonks all stress the importance of "empowering consumers" to make "healthy choices".

Jack Winkler, a nutrition expert at the London Metropolitan University, offers a contrary view. "There is a basic choice you face. Do you try and change people or do you try and change the food you eat?" he says. Winkler thinks that in EU countries there has been "a gross imbalance" towards giving health information, which has been "a conspicuous failure". Instead, he argues that regulators and the industry should focus attention on reducing salt, fat and sugar in processed foods.

Some big companies have begun going down this path. Unilever has reviewed its entire range of 22,000 products according to nutritional benchmarks. The exercise appears to be more than a cynical attempt to tick the corporate-social-responsibility box in the annual report. The benchmarks were published in the European Journal of Clinical Nutrition, leaving them open to peer review from scientists. Winkler says he does "not agree with every comma" of the benchmarks, but "as an innovation for a multinational food company, it is miraculous". Kraft and Nestle are undertaking similar exercises on some product ranges.

But food companies that have bought into this idea say it has its limits. Lyn Trytsman-Gray, director of public affairs at Kraft Foods, says the company has been reviewing the nutritional standards of its cheese range and has reduced fat content for some cheeses and developed new light and extra light product alternatives. But Trytsman-Gray says that European regulations on other products, such as the composition of chocolate, limit the company’s ability to make changes in nutritional values. Instead Kraft has repackaged its chocolates and rejigged portion sizes, to make chocolates easier to reseal and discourage people from eating a pack in one go. Trytsman-Gray adds the caveat that not eating the chocolates still depends on consumer willpower.

The soft-drinks industry has also been developing new ranges, promoting juices, waters and sugar-free versions. (Although it is worth pointing out that some of the most-hyped alternatives, such as sugar-free ‘Coke Zero’ contain artificial sweeteners.)

Phil Myers, public and government affairs director at Pepsi Cola, who chairs the Nutrition Communications Taskforce at the Union of European Beverage Associations (UNESDA), says: "These decisions [to develop new products] aren’t taken lightly, because they can affect your business, but increasingly consumers are expecting it...It’s no longer the case that you only have a choice of a full-sugar or [another] full-sugar."

In 2006 the nine soft-drinks companies who make up UNESDA agreed to stop advertising to children under 12 on TV, radio and internet and not to sell products in primary schools. According to an independent audit by Pricewaterhouse-Coopers, the companies are 99% compliant across TV, print and the internet and 93% compliant in schools.

Public-health campaigners acknowledge that the industry has made efforts to respond to obesity concerns, but argue that it needs to do more. Caroline Bollars, a policy officer at the European Public Health Alliance (EPHA), thinks the industry also needs to send price signals to consumers, by putting up the price of chocolate bars and making fruit and vegetables cheaper. She suggests that changing nutritional content could be one way to make unhealthy processed foods more expensive: "Using trans-fats [‘bad fats’] is cheaper than unsaturated [‘good’] fats because the production is less complicated." But whether companies will volunteer to raise the price of some of their best-selling and most popular products looks doubtful.

Europe is getting fatter. Jennifer Rankin reports on industry efforts to curb growing levels of obesity.