WE KNOW that when it comes to buying groceries, we should stock up on vegetables and steer clear of the $1.99 Tim Tams tempting us right in front of the aisle.
But when it comes to identifying which packaged foods are good choices, choosing the healthier option isn’t always clear.
Three years ago, the federal government launched the Health Star Rating System, which resulted in some supermarket products being rated a certain number of stars based on particular nutritional criteria.
Despite some superficial success, there is plenty more criticism to suggest that the system is fundamentally flawed and in urgent need of major review.
So what is actually wrong with the Health Star Rating System?
A complex nutritional algorithm has been formulated in an attempt to weigh up the good and not so good nutrients a particular food offers. But its failure to isolate specific ingredients such as sugar within this calculation, has resulted in some foods which are naturally higher in saturated fat (like full cream dairy) having a lower rating than lower fat, yet heavily processed foods including snack food and confectionery.
The classic example of this can be seen in the case of Greek yogurt — a natural whole food -which scores just one star using the rating system, compared to a bag of lollies which scores two stars.
It is hardly surprising that you can find frozen vegetables, healthy snack foods and bottled water with five stars, but many packets of lollies, biscuits and chips have no Health Star Rating at all. For any public health nutritional guidance system that has the goal of directing consumers towards healthy food choices to work, all foods need to be labelled so consumers can easily compared across products and brands.
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