Reading between the lines
When Smith Klein Beecham claimed on the bottle that Ribena Toothkind ‘does not encourage tooth decay’, the Advertising Standards Authority disagreed. The matter ended up in court and in January, a High Court judge found against Ribena Toothkind, forcing them to remove it from the label.
Misleading labelling affects us all – there are six servings per second of Ribena Toothkind in this country and most of them are to children whose mums and dads think they are being kind to their offspring’s teeth.
So how can we be sure that our supermarket trolley is not full of ingredients we don’t want to eat or drink? And how reliable is the labelling?
If you’re trying not to eat too much sugar, for example, you need to be the Sherlock Holmes of the supermarket aisle. Take the cereal packet I was reading this morning. It was one of those fruit and fibre products with all sorts of stamps on the front – ‘suitable for vegetarians’ (what are they putting in cereal these days?) ‘contains folic acid’, ‘high in fibre’, etc. There were so many goody-goody stamps that there was barely room for the picture of the cereal. Look at the side of the packet, though, and the third ingredient after wheat and raisins is sugar and the seventh is salt.
Manufacturers have to list the ingredients in the size order they appear in the product, so if sugar comes first it means there is more sugar than anything else. Bad news for frozen yoghurt fans. Think you’re being virtuous choosing frozen yoghurt over ice cream? Think again – the first ingredient is sugar.
Disguise is another favourite weapon used by manufacturers to confuse us. Sugar can be called all sorts of scientific sounding names like sucrose, glucose, and so on, so that your favourite sparkling drink, Lucozade turns out to be 26% glucose syrup – sugar, in other words.
Dairy products are another classic example of confusing labelling. Fromage frais comes in handy children sized pots these days, usually with a favourite character like Thomas the Tank Engine plastered on the cover.
But look at the claims on the front of the pots: ‘real fruit purée’ (isn’t that what you expect anyway?), ‘no preservatives,’ ‘no artificial sweeteners’, ‘no colours’. You can be sure that if the competition doesn’t shout their list of no.. no.. no… they’re full of artificial sweeteners, preservatives and colours.
The principle ‘if they don’t deny it, it’s probably there’ is also true for genetically modified products. It’s difficult to avoid because soya and maize turn up in around 80% of processed foods. And while GM soya and maize proteins and flour have to be labelled GM, other ingredients or derivatives don’t. Look out for soya or maize oil, starch, emulsifier, lecithin, glucose, fructose and dextrose as these could be GM too.
Next page: GM, eggs and how to complain
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