Ms Maureen Mulvihill:

Professor Donal O'Shea is chair of our nutrition council and he has answered Senator van Turnhout's question very well. His response echoes what I said in my presentation that it is the foods at the top of the pyramid which are high in fat, sugar and salt which give us cause for concern. I wish to add to what the Chairman asked about how to identify foods from the top shelf and how to create a more informed consumer. Allied to the calorie count on menus in catering establishments, the Irish Heart Foundation, along with many public health allies both here and across Europe, has called for a traffic light coding system on the front of packs.

This would allow customers to see, at a glance, whether a product is high in fat, sugar and salt. The new regulations being introduced in 2014 include provisions relating to back-of-pack data. This will add a huge amount of information, but consumers will still have to process all the different numbers. Guideline daily amount information is permitted on the front of pack, but numbers are more complex to read and take more time to process. We have proposed, in the context of the debate on this issue at the European Parliament, that a combination of GDA information and traffic light coding would be the most effective. Research in Ireland by the Irish Heart Foundation and in the United Kingdom, Germany and Australia confirms that this approach would best aid consumers in identifying whether particular products are high in fat, salt and so on.