This is significant support for the Nutri-score, a nutritional logo that is the subject of a bitter battle between epidemiologists, industrialists and certain producer groups. Wednesday 1er September, the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), an agency of the World Health Organization (WHO), published a summary note on the Nutri-score, calling to his “Compulsory and urgent adoption at European Union level and beyond”. According to the IARC, this logo – which provides information on the nutritional composition of manufactured foods, by means of a score ranging from A to E and a color code from green to red affixed on the front of the packaging – “Is an effective tool to guide consumers towards healthier food choices”, and in this sense participates in the prevention against cancer.
To establish this “Brief”, the IARC experts drew on the latest scientific data, in particular those from the EPIC cohort (a vast European survey on the links between diet and health carried out on more than 500,000 people), showing a significant link between the consumption of foods better rated by the Nutri-score, and a lower risk of cancer and mortality. And Inge Huybrechts, researcher in nutritional epidemiology at IARC to specify:
“These published works, added to all the scientific literature available today on the Nutri-score (nearly fifty publications at the international level), now constitute a very robust base of knowledge leading to recommend its adoption as logo compulsory in Europe. “
In the EU, tensions over a European Nutri-score
While several European countries are standing up against this labeling, the IARC insists in this document on the need for “Science guides political decisions in the field of public health”. The European Commission has committed, through its “F2F” farm to fork food strategy, to adopt a harmonized nutritional logo by the end of 2022, without specifying what form it would take. A small group of European countries have since been battling against this measure, in particular to prevent the Nutri-score from being the chosen logo. At the head of these rebels, Italy, whose representatives frequently cite the examples of Grana Padano or Parma ham, rated D or E, or that of olive oil, classified C, to discredit the Nutri-score , perceived as an attack on the “Mediterranean diet”.
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