Food Standards Agency (FSA) targets for reducing saturated fat in meat, dairy and savoury snack products will be unveiled later this month, the FSA has revealed.
The draft targets have been developed as part of the FSA’s programme to reduce the percentage of energy derived from saturated fat in the average UK diet from more than 13% to 11%. They follow the July publication of targets for bakery products - on which the FSA is currently consulting.
Judith Holden from the FSA’s nutrition division said meat and dairy products represented almost half (46%) of the saturated fat consumed in the UK and must therefore be the focus of reformulation efforts. She was speaking at a Leatherhead Food Research conference on saturated fat.
She declined to comment on how stringent the targets were likely to be. But she insisted the FSA had worked closely with the industry when developing its recommendations to ensure they would be “technically feasible”
There were all kinds of ingredients and technologies from fibres and gums to nano-emulsions to help firms reduce fat and maintain a creamy texture in dairy products, said conference chairman Professor Ian Givens. However, a more radical approach would be to manipulate cattle feed so cows would produce milk with a more favourable fatty acid profile, he argued.
Givens - based at the University of Reading - has been working on the EU-funded Lipgene project. Among other things this has been exploring how changing the diet of animals could significantly improve the nutritional profile of their products, from milk to poultry meat.
This was infinitely preferable to cutting back on dairy consumption, or “playing around” excessively with products in a bid to reduce fat, he said. “Simply reducing consumption of milk and dairy is not a sensible way to reducing saturated fatty acid intakes. For a start, research suggests that people with above average intakes of dairy are less, not more, likely to develop heart disease.”
Milk products also contained compounds that actively promoted cardiovascular health as well as key nutrients [such as calcium] that were good for other parts of the body, he added. “They may also play a particular role in the diet of older people.”
For full details of Givens’ project and the conference, see the November issue of Food Manufacture magazine.