The usefulness of the new 5-color nutritional logo adopted for nutrition labeling in France
The Ministers of Health, Agriculture and the Economy have decided to introduce the 5-color Nutri-score logo, which can be affixed to food packaging on an optional basis.
The aim of this new nutritional labeling system is to reduce the incidence of chronic diseases, including obesity and diabetes, in France.
It is now the official nutrition label recommended in France.
Synthetic, understandable and based on scientific principles, it provides consumers with immediate information on the nutritional quality of food products on the market.
Why a new nutrition label?
These days, everyone agrees that food product labels are complex, if not impossible to decipher.
Indeed, to compare two products, you need a sound knowledge of nutrition, and of course you also need to be familiar with certain scientific terms or chemical names of certain components.
However, when you go shopping, you don’t have the time to go through each product before deciding whether or not to buy it.
And unfortunately, buying the wrong product leads to poor dietary choices, which are a direct cause of overweight and obesity and all the pathologies that can follow.
The aim of this new 5-color logo is to put an end to the lack of legibility of nutritional information on the products we consume every day.
How does the 5-color logo work?
As we have just seen, the new 5-color logo is designed to make the quantity of a food product’s components (fat, sugar, etc.) more legible and accessible to all consumers, based on 5 distinct colors.
This new Nutri-Score logo evaluates foods on a nutritional scale from green to red: green for balanced products, red for foods with too much fat or sugar, and three intermediate colors (yellow, orange, pink).
In short, this new nutritional labeling system makes it possible to identify at a glance which foods are nutritionally good or bad, and more specifically their fat and sugar content.
How is the food score calculated?
The score assigned to each product is based on the nutrients it contains.
A distinction is made between nutrients that are detrimental to health (salt, sugar, etc.) and those that are beneficial (protein, fiber, etc.).
This score is then represented by a letter and an associated color to facilitate consumer choice.
A simple glance is all it takes to assess the nutritional content of a product.
There’s no need to struggle to decipher a product’s components one by one.
