kate lucas quote web

Reduce carbs, limit dairy, avoid fat, watch sodium, eat your 5 a day, have small meals and snacks… No, wait, avoid snacking, check added sugar, cut out sugar completely…

Admittedly, the landscape of what is and isn’t healthy has confused us on many occasions. Stakeholders throughout food and nutrition have a seemingly endless array of conflicting directives that ebb and flow over the decades. For example, the report from the National Obesity Forum released recently, which asserts fat is good for you, is stealing the limelight from the great sugar debate. But is it even a new story?

Every season brings a new trend and the question ‘is fat good for you?’ has long been debated, even celebrated, if we think back to the Atkins diet.

At KIND, we have always believed in keeping it simple. A healthy diet is comprised of eating real food that’s minimally processed and nutrient-rich, with vegetables, fruits, nuts and pulses, and carbs, dairy and protein to balance. This includes heart-healthy fats.

Regulation has not always aligned with our philosophy - and in the US, KIND Snacks recently hit the headlines as they managed to prompt the FDA to re-evaluate its 20-year-old definition of the term ‘healthy’, which discriminated against foods generally considered to be good for you (like nuts, avocado and salmon), while creating perverse incentives for companies to produce nutrient-void foods that are low in fat (like sugary cereal and low-fat toaster pastries).

Similarly in the UK, since the voluntary introduction of traffic lighting, our food labels have crossed from scientific fact (listing exactly what is in a product) to delivering a red, amber, green judgement.

With fat and sugar causing considerable debate over what is and isn’t good for you, our food labels also fall short of their promise to educate consumers about a healthy diet, much like the US definition of ‘healthy’.

To illustrate the misinterpretation of a food product’s nutritional value by solely relying on the traffic light system, you can simply compare diet fizzy drink with an avocado. A diet cola scores green on all four traffic lights: fat, saturates, sugars, and salt. Yet there is no perceived nutritional value. However, an avocado - a known superfood - scores red on fat and saturates, green on sugar and salt AND offers nutritional benefits of fibre, potassium and vitamin B6.

UK traffic light labels fail to take into account nutritional benefits, only the nutritional information. We seem to be at a crossroads where food labelling is black and white, and this system is doing a disservice to some foods that should be perceived healthy. It’s very dangerous to score food only on its percentage of fat, saturates, sugar and salt.

We must strive to develop dietary guidelines that reflect modern science, and update packaging regulations to reflect this. Balance and the hunt for whole, nutritionally dense foods must be addressed. Finally, we need more effective and consistent consumer education covering how simple it really is to construct a healthy daily diet.

Kate Lucas is managing director at KIND Snacks UK