Supermarkets and processed food make a healthy diet difficult
The proliferation of processed foods has made healthy diet decisions harder than ever, but help is available.
A trip to the supermarket was once a delightful excursion for a child, full of light and colour and opportunity and wonder. But as an adult, especially a parent, it is serious business.
You have to be careful not to let your childlike mind drift off, your eyes distracted by the seasonal displays, your stomach distracted by all those chocolately, chippy, candy-filled delights. There are more important things to calculate than the savings on that item you never would have bought had it not been discounted. You have to think for your gut, not with it; put the blinkers on and use your mature brain because this task, shoppers, is a matter of life and death.
Most shoppers use supermarkets, more often than not part of the Woolworths or Coles chains. Supermarkets are big business, just as food and beverage manufacturing is big business, and the corporations don’t always have your best interests at heart.
Yet between the push of corporate advertising, and the pull from public health experts, dietitians and misguided celebrity chefs, you are still left to navigate the supermarkets yourself. Shelf placement is not as simple as it seems, product categories can be misleading (“lifestyle drinks”, anyone?) and labels are ever-changing. An impulse buy may deliver a brief sensation to the tastebuds but have a lasting impact on your body.
The best advice on how to approach a supermarket is to stick to the outside aisle where there are healthy whole foods in the form of vegetables, fruit, meat and seafood. Once you traverse the inner aisles, where the foods are mostly concealed by packaging, decisions get more complicated. Thankfully, an increasing number of products have health star ratings that rate the overall nutritional profile of a product.
David Gillespie is a doctor with has more than 30 years’ experience as a gastroenterologist and consultant specialist physician and is the federal Assistant Health Minister.
“As I always told my patients, fresh is always best,” Gillespie says.
“Shop around the perimeter of the supermarket because that’s where all the fresh stuff is, and the processed food in cardboard and shiny packages is in the aisles.”
It is the processed food in the aisles that Gillespie and his predecessors have been most concerned about. In response, and through collaboration with industry, public health and consumer groups, voluntary health star ratings were rolled out in June 2014, giving manufacturers the option of promoting the nutritional value of their product on the front of the packaging.
On face value, the approach is simple: health star ratings offer consumers information on total energy, salt and saturated fat content with a simple star system of anywhere from half a star to five stars — the higher the better.
“Health star ratings are not designed to compare one food against another, they’re designed to compare various products within a food group,” Gillespie says.
“You use them to compare muesli bars with muesli bars, yoghurt with yoghurt, not a pasta meal with fresh fish. And that is important because we’ve already seen manufacturers improve their ingredients to get a better rating. They don’t want to get half a star if their competitors are getting three.”
While some such initiatives are keenly debated and often hotly contested, health star ratings have been adopted by at least 115 companies, with a rating on more than 5500 of 12,500 products on the shelves.
A formal review of the system will be discussed by food ministers this year.
However, the ministers’ most recent meeting heard positive signs: about 59 per cent of consumers are aware of health star ratings, with 33 per cent choosing (and are likelier to keep buying) an alternative product because it has a higher rating.
Gillespie says the behavioural change is crucial, whether it starts with consumers or manufacturers. As a doctor, he is worried about the number of Australians who are overweight and obese, and the fact that number, like the people, keeps getting bigger.
Despite the perception of Australia as a sport-loving, outdoor-living, fresh-food eating country, we have one of the highest rates of obesity in the world.
The proportion of Australians aged 18 and older who are overweight or obese increased from 56.3 per cent in 1995 to 61.2 per cent in 2007-08.
Despite greater awareness of the problem, these rates keep increasing: from 62.8 per cent in 2011-12 to 63.4 per cent in 2014-15.
The highest rates of obesity are found in men aged 45 to 54 and women aged 55 to 64, increasing the risk of chronic conditions such as cardiovascular disease, Type 2 diabetes and certain cancers.
These figures generally can be traced back to diet and exercise. In 2014-15, only 49.8 per cent of Australian adults consumed two or more servings of fruit every day, as recommended, while only 7 per cent got the right intake of vegetables (five to six servings or more of vegetables for men depending on age, and five or more servings for women).
Only one in 20 adults, or 5.1 per cent, met the guidelines on fruit and vegetables, exacerbating the impact of low rates of regular physical activity.
Gillespie encourages people to eat more fresh, whole foods — those found on the perimeter of the supermarket — and use the health star ratings to be more careful and calculated when shopping the aisles.
Today he is launching a new promotional campaign to encourage more Australians to consider health star ratings on products when they shop.
And anything to help consumers make more informed decisions has to be a good thing.
“The health star rating is a part of the government’s approach to improving the nutrition and weight of Australians,” Gillespie says. “I’m not a nanny state sort of person, nor is the Coalition government, but everyone’s in the tent on this: food manufacturers, processors, marketers, dietitians, government regulators, the Food and Grocery Council, big supermarkets, the Healthy Food Partnership.”
The calculator used for health star ratings is consistent with the 2013 Australian Dietary Guidelines developed by the National Health and Medical Research Council.
Foods low in saturated fat, total sugars, sodium and/or energy are assigned higher star ratings than similar foods with an appreciably higher content of these nutrients, and foods with a high fibre content are assigned a higher star rating than similar foods with an appreciably lower fibre content.
Consumers should still pay careful attention to serving size, to fully understand the ratings and the guidelines, and look for the fine print.
For example, consumer group Choice has pointed out that Milo promotes a 4½-star rating on its tin, but that is when the product is made with skim milk.
On its own, Milo is rated only 1½ stars, but because it is a voluntary system the manufacturers and retailers are responsible for the correct and accurate use of health star ratings.
In November last year food ministers discussed the formation of a technical advisory group that would review its work in the lead-up to a five-year review due in 2019.
Behind the scenes, the work of this group — and the lobbying and debate — will have the biggest impact on the calculator and, through it, the ratings, especially considering the dietary guidelines are unlikely to be reviewed before 2023.
During the next few years you can expect to hear more mixed messages about the dietary impact of certain fats and sweeteners.
While we await consensus, though, you can still lift your intake of fresh, whole foods and become a more mindful shopper in the aisles.
Any improvements will be good for you in the long run, and maybe even good for the next generation.
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