Since a year ago, food labelling has become more extensive. When shopping or when putting the groceries away, have you already noticed the little circles or miniatures of garbage bins with percentages on them? What do they mean? There are a lot of things you need to know when buying groceries.

As parents of a child with diabetes, you are sure to already know much about healthy, balanced nutrition. You have already learnt about the nutritional value of certain foods and what effects they have on blood sugar in several classes. Perhaps you can remember how, at the beginning, you used to scrutinize the food labels to check the carbohydrate content.

Familiar information  
According to law, food labels need to provide nutritional facts for 100 g / 100 ml of any food stuff. Sometimes the companies limit themselves to the ‘big 4’ (see illustration), which include fat (plus saturated fats), sugar, salt and calories. Sometimes companies include eight elements (also known as the ‘big 8’), ie, calories, protein, sugar, carbohydrate, fat, saturated fats, fibre, and sodium. From these tables, one can calculate the carbohydrate content. Calculating the carbohydrate content of the amount of food that will actually be served is usually the duty of the parents. 

In diabetes coaching sessions, children are usually hesitant at first to attempt the calculations, but are unstoppable once they have grasped the technique. Nowadays, one can discover more and more frequently labels that give the carbohydrate content according to serving size. 

Why all these labels?
Nearly everyday one reads or hears how the number of obese people is drastically rising. This increase is mainly due to our decadent lifestyles. Experts advise us to do more physical activity, to moderate our intake of fats, saturated fats, sugar and salt, and to eat more fruit and vegetables. To this end, improved and more detailed information on food labels complete with the GDAs, for example, are supposed to assist the consumer.

What are GDAs?
GDAs are ‘Guideline Daily Amounts’. On the front of the packaging, you will find a standardized symbol with the energy value (in kcal per portion) as well as a percentage figure. On the back, you will find information on sugar content, fat, saturated fats, and sodium. Alongside of these, you will find the recommended daily amounts. 

The traffic light coding system
Since March 2006, a traffic light coding system was introduced in the UK. Health professionals and consumer organizations in Germany are pressing to adopt this system of labelling as well. The traffic light system should assist the consumer to instantly identify excessively high sugar, salt, fat contents in processed foods. Red stands for very high content, yellow for moderate, and green for minimal. 

The hitches
The GDAs are calculated according to the average daily amounts required for an average woman. Values for men, children and seniors are significantly different! The percentages are not always fully understood and require complicated calculations. On foods for children, the GDAs are calculated according to the average daily amounts required for children aged between 5 and 10 years. It is not clear, however, where these GDAs come from. This actually renders the information inadmissable. And: What is a portion? Are we going to eat just one biscuit, or half a pizza? Also, portion sizes vary so much, that it is difficult to compare products.

The problem with the traffic light system is that it tends to categorize products into ‘good’ or ‘bad’. This, in itself, is problematic. Such evaluations can only be considered in context with the daily total nutritional intake.

Worthless info
The array of additional nutritional facts along with their accompanying symbols fail to offer parents and children much in terms of valuable further information. They just tends to confuse matters. The traditional labels were good enough, and one could better judge the effect a product would have on blood sugar.
If you want to give yourself and your child a balanced diet, and find the new labelling more complex than practical, here are some tips that may help:

1. Fresh foods usually contain less fat, sugar and salt than processed foods.
2. Eat fruit, vegetables and wholemeal foods several times a day.
3. Select alternatives to fat and sugar where possible, for example, top the pizza yourself, or use apple sauce instead of stewed apples.
4. Avoid processed foods. Try, instead, to make them yourself.

Contact:
Evelin Sadeghian
Dietitian
Kinderkrankenhaus auf der Bult
Hannover
E-mail: adipositas@hka.de