> Only putting the warning on drinks with more than 50g of added sugar
Wait till you see all the tricks food producers use to avoid the added sugar label. “grape juice concentrate” is not an added sugar if the food is grapes flavored, for example.
Increasingly marketed-as-healthier foods don’t include any sugar at all. Yet half the ingredients are various sugars. Sometimes as cheeky as “sugarcane concentrate”
My immediate thought while reading the article was both "What counts as 'added' sugar?" and "Who is making this 'daily recommended amount of added sugars'?"
Of course, all of this information is already available via nutrition facts for most sold foods.
The root problem here doesn't seem to be the availability of information, I expect it to be more about the availability of time and effort to spend on priority of personal health. I don't think the issue is that people don't know that food isn't bad for them, it's that their health is lower priority than their immediate needs of feeding themselves and their families.
If anything, as you point out, this seems to be a better way for food manufacturers to bend the rules to avoid the logo and make something seem healthier than it is rather than giving more information to consumers. The _fact_ (X Grams of Sugar) is on the package but the logo indicates that the food contains more than x grams of "recommended" "added" sugars, two things that can be misunderstood and/or gamed.
> If anything, as you point out, this seems to be a better way for food manufacturers to bend the rules to avoid the logo and make something seem healthier than it is rather than giving more information to consumers
Drinks in particular are tricky here. Take apple juice for example. You can have 2 brands with vastly different sugar levels and neither has added sugar. Just different concentrations.
Consumers (especially kids) will generally prefer the sweeter brand. And it all sounds healthy because it’s marketed as pure fruits! It’s even true, the juice is pure fruit. Just in concentrations that are extremely unhealthy.
Wait till you see all the tricks food producers use to avoid the added sugar label. “grape juice concentrate” is not an added sugar if the food is grapes flavored, for example.
Increasingly marketed-as-healthier foods don’t include any sugar at all. Yet half the ingredients are various sugars. Sometimes as cheeky as “sugarcane concentrate”