Sugars, Salt, Saturated Fat and Fibre Purchased through Packaged Food and Soft Drinks in Europe 2015–2018: Are We Making Progress?

Abstract

The availability, purchase and consumption of foods high in fat, sugars and salt and low in fibre are linked to the high health and economic burden of noncommunicable diseases, including cancer, in Europe. Therefore, assessing the quality of the food offer is key as feedback to decision makers, as well as to identify good practices and areas of the food supply still requiring urgent action. We combined detailed market share and sales data with nutrition composition data to evaluate the nutritional quality of 14 packaged food and soft drinks categories sold across 22 European countries over the 2015–2018 period. Our analysis shows great variability of the nutritional composition within and among packaged food and soft drinks categories across European countries. Our estimates of the market-share weighted mean, a measure that integrates possible changes in nutrient content with the amount of a product sold to consumers, as well as daily per capita nutrient sale estimates, suggest a small but statistically significant progress in certain food categories only. Overall, the amounts of sugars, saturated fat, salt and fibre being sold to European citizens through these products is not improving to an extent to meet public health objectives.

Reply to Hodac, N.; Wittekind, A. Comment on “Moz-Christofoletti, M.A.; Wollgast, J. Sugars, Salt, Saturated Fat and Fibre Purchased through Packaged Food and Soft Drinks in Europe 2015–2018: Are We Making Progress? Nutrients 2021, 13, 2416”

“…This is particularly important since these two metrics are used to assess progress against the ambition for sugar reduction from a public health perspective [ 3 , 4 ]. As in [ 2 ], the results from Figure 1 confirm that greater sugar reduction is observed in drinks with relatively lower market volume, while products with a higher market share have reduced their sugar content to a lesser extent.…”

“…Figure 1 presents the 2015–2018 estimated changes in average sugars (g/100 mL), sales-weighted mean sugars (g/100 mL) and total sugars sold to consumers through retailers (g/per capita/day) when removing (i) 100% juice products (light blue bar) and (ii) 100% juices and concentrates (dark blue bar). It shows that the inclusion of 100% juice and concentrates (liquids/powders) within the soft drinks category as in Moz-Christofoletti and Wollgast [ 2 ]—driven by the categorisation used by Euromonitor—has not severely diluted the relative progress estimated for this product group. Compared to our published estimates (white bar), a dilution effect of approximately 2.3 percentage points (p.p.)…”

Comment on Moz-Christofoletti, M.A.; Wollgast, J. Sugars, Salt, Saturated Fat and Fibre Purchased through Packaged Food and Soft Drinks in Europe 2015–2018: Are We Making Progress? Nutrients 2021, 13, 2416

“…The European soft drinks industry fully supports efforts to monitor nutrition composition of food products. We were therefore interested to read the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC) publication by Moz-Christofoletti and Wollgast, which attempted to assess progress on processed foods versus existing commitments across European countries between 2015 and 2018 [ 1 ].…”

“…Although the paper provides definitions for the sub-categories of products included in each of the food and beverage categories in an Appendix [ 1 ], it may not be sufficiently clear to the reader that their “Soft Drinks” category included 100% juice—the latter is a separate category under EU food law which cannot legally be allowed to be reformulated and still sold as juice. While we understand that inclusion of 100% juice has been driven by the product categories of the commercial provider of the data, this inclusion has severely diluted the relative progress which has been achieved in sugar reduction using the EU definition of soft drinks.…”

“…In addition, the maximum levels of total sugars (g/100 mL) for soft drinks in Table 2 [ 1 ], appear to include concentrates (liquids/powders) which, without application of a dilution factor that is always applied when consumed, result in exceedingly high sugar levels (>90 g/100 mL).…”