Processed Food Labels Could Be About to Get a Lot Scarier

If you've ever taken a guilty glance at the nutritional information on that family bag of salted caramel choco bites you promised yourself you wouldn't eat all at once, you'll know that deciphering food packaging labels pretty much requires a degree in translation studies. Or at least your contact lenses.

Even when you get past all the listed additives, fructose syrups, and E numbers you never knew went that high, there's the seemingly conflicted "Recommended Daily Allowance" stats for sugar, sugar from fat, and all those percentages versus grams versus traffic light colours.

It's (almost) enough to ruin a perfectly good snacking session.

Many health experts say that this difficulty in figuring out exactly how much sugar our favourite packaged foods contain is preventing us from making informed dietary choices.

Currently, packaging on processed foods shows how much of an adult's recommended daily sugar intake is used up in each portion. The problem is that this figure is based on the 90 gram limit on all sugars consumed daily, including those that occur naturally in unprocessed foods like fruit and dairy, rather than the 30 gram limit for sugar added to food, which was introduced by the British government last month.

Currently, neither British nor European law requires food packaging to distinguish between added sugars and those that are naturally occurring.

As The Daily Telegraph points out, this means that while you may think you're fine gulping back a 330 millilitre can of Coca-Cola because it says it contains 39 percent of your daily sugar allowance, the labelling neglects to mention that the drink actually holds 117 percent of the limit on added sugars.

According to the newspaper, the UK government wants this to change and is considering asking food companies to include clearer labelling information that shows the proportion of sugar per serving.

It's a move that would be welcomed by many in the healthcare industry. Speaking to The Sunday Times, Simon Stevens, chief executive of NHS England said: "Food labelling is confusing and hard for consumers to follow, it needs to be changed substantially. We can do a much better job and it will be a good way of empowering consumers to make choices."

Over in the sugar-saturated US, government bodies are calling for similar changes to the way in which sugar levels are communicated on packaging. Last month, the Food and Drug Administration proposed that nutrition labels on processed foods cite the amount of added sugars they contain as percentage of daily calorie intake.

While such suggestions have drawn criticism from some food industry figures who claim that extra labelling information could confuse consumers further, many experts have praised this focus on excess sugar levels instead of fat.

Speaking to The Scotsman, nutritionist Emma Conroy said she was "very positive about this sustained attention to sugars rather than fats," citing the example of a "low fat yogurt with added sugar" having "a much higher impact on the body's blood sugar than a full fat yogurt with sugars naturally occurring in lactose."

No one can fault the need for clearer food labelling system, but the question is whether knowing that those double chocolate chip cookies contain two days' worth of sugar will ever be enough to stop us from reaching for the packet anyway.