Saturday 4 April 2009

Confusing labelling on supermarket products

We went over to Sainsbury’s to do some shopping, where besides buying food for the next few days, we looked at the nutritional information of dozens of products. My wife would pick up something and say ‘what’s the fat in that?’, or ‘how much sugar in this?’ Myself, I was on some sort of crusade, I was looking at things to see if they were clearly labelled, for example, there was a pot of noodles that pointed out on the front that there was less than 5% fat. I looked at the nutritional information on the back and there was 7% saturated fat per pot! That’s more than a third of an adult female’s daily allowance. I couldn’t figure out where they got this ‘less than 5%' figure from. All I could see was that the actual fat content per 100g was 3.8g, so technically it was less than 5%, but you would be eating 7g saturated in a whole pot – really cheeky labelling. I also had another look at some of the differences with the fat content of dark and milk chocolate. On everything from chocolate digestives to chocolate bars, the dark chocolate versions were all higher in saturated fat!

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