Trade Talk

The Food Standards Agency's (FSA's) commendably brief draft saturated fat and energy intake programme recognises there aren't many options for cutting fat and sugar in the nation's diet, other than the obvious.

Reducing portion size is the age-old and most self-evident method of body weight control and reduction. Why doesn't the FSA limit itself to this, in combination with the Department of Health's proposed education and exercise strategy set out in its 'Healthy Weight, Healthy Lives'? Instead, it extends the strategy to include partnerships with industry to reformulate products.

If there's a market for reformulated products, why can't processors proceed on their own, as they are already successfully doing? If the Department of Health's strategy works, demand for these products will increase and market forces will kick in.

If the preferred method of controlling energy intake is via the smaller portion route, then it could be counterproductive to encourage consumers to continue to ingest the same volume of food, albeit containing fewer calories. It would not educate people to eat less, so stomach sizes would stay the same and so would appetites.

Reformulation of foods might have sustainability disadvantages with transport and packaging. For instance, if two people shared a full-fat ready meal this would require half the packaging than if they each ate a pack reformulated to contain less saturated fat.

The FSA mentioned that parts of industry were concerned about potential increased packaging, and hence costs, for smaller portions. But logic dictates that if the population ate less, the packaging and transport costs would be proportionately lower.

Also, it is conceivable that the carbon footprint of reformulated products might be greater. For example, if animal fat was replaced by vegetable oil there could be surplus of the former to dispose of either by wasteful destruction or by use as an ingredient in other foods. At the same time, more energy will be used to extract the vegetable oil from the seeds or grains that might otherwise be eaten whole. In the UK, for example, there is already a surplus of cream as a by-product of skimmed and semi-skimmed drinking milk. This is mainly transported out of the UK to the Continent where some of it is turned into butter oil.

A policy involving smaller portion sizes might fill food traders with alarm because it would reduce volume sales to existing consumers locally. But new markets could fill the gap.

Clare Cheney​​ is director general at the Provision Trade Federation​