Industry pitches in to target saturated fats

Processors including Bernard Matthews and Mars, trade bodies, charities and medical groups are meeting the Food Standards Agency (FSA) on February 21 to review plans to tackle saturated fats in foods.

The top six supermarkets, industry research and grocery think tank IGD, the Royal College of Physicians and the Royal College of General Practitioners have also been invited.

The group will thrash out ideas for cutting the amount of saturated fats people consume from 13.3% to less than 11% of food energy. The meeting will follow last week’s launch of the first stage of the FSA’s saturated fat and energy intake programme.

The FSA claimed UK saturated fat intakes 20% higher than government recommendations contributed to complaints such as heart disease, diabetes, some cancers and obesity.

As part of the programme, an independent workshop on portion sizes, chaired by Dr Susan Jebb, head of nutrition and health research at the Medical Research Council, is convening in April.

Kaarin Goodburn, secretary general of the Chilled Food Association, said reducing sat fats raised big questions: “Are we going to end up with products people don’t like? Where are the big wins? More needs to be done on the contribution to saturated fats in the diet from various types of food.”

The FSA and the industry are also aware that removing saturated fats is not as easy as reducing salt or sugar in products. A spokeswoman for the Food and Drink Federation said: “Because saturated fats are mainly solid at room temperature, the product’s physical structure would change if you removed the saturated fat.”

In addition, according to EU directives, the definition of products such as different types of chocolates, ice creams and mayonnaise is tied to the amount of saturated fats they contain.

Ed Komorowski, technical director at dairy industry trade body Dairy UK, said: “People could top up saturated fats with vegetable fats in reformulated products, but if you do that, they become non-dairy products.”

He warned the problem with product reformulation driven by industry rather than consumers was that it could create unpopular products. “Semi-skimmed milk [rather than full fat milk] became mainstream through consumer choice.”

He said it was difficult to create low fat cheese that tasted good and if consumers were put off cheese by demonising saturated fats they would miss essential nutrients.