Dr. Luca Piretta is a gastroenterologist and nutritionist. Professor at the Biomedical Campus University of Rome. He has recently been in Madrid to participate in a conference and meeting on front labeling and the Mediterranean diet.
What role do labels play on the front of food packaging?
That is a very important issue that will develop in the coming months, since the European Union is going to decide what type of label will be used on the packaging. The best-known system is the Nutriscore, which is represented by letters that range from “A” to “E”, from green to red, and indicates which foods contain the most fats, sugars and saturated fatty acids as a Warning to the consumer so that they can consume the food that is healthiest.
This creates a problem and that is that each food is not made up of a single nutrient, but rather is made up of several. If we inform ourselves about just one and forget about the rest, we risk giving the consumer bad advice because it is very difficult for us to exceed the limit of fats, sugars or calories with one portion of a food. So we try to want to do something right and we end up doing it wrong.
The alternative that Italy has proposed is the NutrInform Battery, a mechanism characterized by the presence of an information system, always of those nutrients, that is, fats, sugars, salt, calories and saturated fatty acids, where the consumer is not encouraged to consume or, on the contrary, disincentivized to do so. He is simply informed.
In this model there are no colors and it explains how much of each nutrient will be consumed with the portion and not with the 100 grams that Nutriscore recommends, so it is more personalized. The consumer knows, if he is going to eat a portion of that food, how many sugars he has left to consume throughout the day. It is not a warning that will suddenly advise the consumer against consuming a food that makes no sense to stop consuming.
Do you think that the Nutriscore is an effective and truthful measure when it comes to informing the consumer?
A first look is effectiveaz, because it can be recognized very immediately thanks to the letters and colors. It is effective in that sense. However, I do not believe that it will be effective in improving the health status of the population, precisely because its advice and letters are calibrated around 100 grams. We are not going to eat 100 grams of oil nor are we going to eat 100 grams of pizza.
For example, frozen pizzas are about 450/500 grams. Yes, Nutriscore calibrated it with a letter with a positive value, in green, contemplating an intake of 100 grams, but we eat 4 or 5 times more, the fats and calories are going to be many more than what Nutriscore calculated to attribute the red letter such a product.
It is really a system that does not indicate what is the advisable nutrition according to the person’s condition, but rather simply induces eating one product instead of another and lends itself to manipulation. For example, in a soft drink like Coca-Cola, if we remove the sugar, we see that it exceeds the letter D and it is not advisable to consume this type of drink in abundance simply because it does not have sugar. So, inevitably, there is going to be a lot of confusion.
Speaking of Nutriscore we say that, in a way, it ignores the Mediterranean diet, what do you think?
Of course because, for example, if we look at many of the typical products of the Mediterranean diet such as oil or cheese, they will be highly penalized under that system. Furthermore, it is not harmonized on a diet, because they are a series of prohibitions that have nothing to do with the Mediterranean diet which, as we know, meets the requirements of the food pyramid, allowing us to cover everything we have to eat. We have to learn about the proportion of foods we should consume, since there are no prohibited foods. The Nutriscore makes a distinction between good and bad foods. This distinction does not make sense because there are no good foods or bad foods.
We can eat everything if we know in what proportion to do so and what are the correct quantities that we should eat. The Mediterranean diet teaches us to eat, above all, foods of plant origin and less of animal origin, but at no time is it prohibited. We have to learn a nutritional education system.
What specifically does NutrInform consist of and what impact can it have on consumers?
NutrInform is a system that tells us through a battery, like a phone charger, how much we fill it with each nutrient depending on the portion we are going to eat of that food. So, if we eat a food that has, due to our need, 20 or 30% fat, we will know that in the rest of the day we will be able to consume the remaining 70% of fat in the recommended daily intake. It is information that requires a nutritional culture on the part of the consumer. This is, in turn, a task that institutions, schools and families have to do to educate the population because it is the only way to improve the level of obesity, cardiovascular diseases or diabetes, which is the objective of the label. . front on the packaging: improving the health of the population But, if we only limit ourselves to suggesting that “this can be eaten” or that “not this” we are not educating anyone. What the European Union wants, precisely, is to provide information and not condition as Nutriscore does, but rather to provide the information that labels should provide.
How important is nutritional education to improve health status?
This is the premise from which we start. Correct nutrition is the most important way to prevent diseases. Almost all the diseases that we know about in Western countries derive from our behaviors. The most important of all is eating behavior, which is the main one, and comes before all the others. Then there is also physical activity, rest, coexistence and learning how to cook the food itself since, for example, consuming raw oil is not the same as consuming fried oil. So, learning how to cook the dishes and foods that we are going to find on the table changes a lot in the discourse of food.
What is the relationship between the Mediterranean Diet, Italian and Spanish cuisine with sustainability and health?
All of these concepts are very important, they belong to a much broader system of education, as I said, in school, family and institutions. Regarding the Mediterranean diet, we have a large amount of documentation and scientific publications that indicate that it is the best dietary model that we can adopt. It is the work of Mediterranean countries, such as Spain, Italy, Greece… since they have the main resources of this diet in abundance. The Mediterranean diet is not about eating pasta alone. Both pasta, rice and couscous belong to the cereal section, which is one of the pillars of the Mediterranean diet. Vegetables, fruit, nuts, oil, legumes are important parts.
Then there are fish, ham and dairy products such as cheese, which are also part of the Mediterranean diet, but should be eaten in smaller quantities. The most important are cereals, fruits and vegetables, nuts, oil, legumes, etc. And that is the essence of the Mediterranean diet. With initiatives such as the week of Italian Cuisine in the world that has just been celebrated, our country aims to publicize the true Mediterranean diet, because sometimes we think that we do follow it and we don’t. For example, we in Italy do not follow it as much as we think and we have to learn to follow it. In recent years we have moved away from the true Mediterranean diet and we must get closer again. And that is the main function of these events: to make known how important it is and how much health it can bring us to do correct prevention through food based on the Mediterranean diet.
