Health claims ignored by the least healthy

At a recently convened NutraIngredients health claims roundtable, Henry Dixon, the owner of UK-based food industry PR firm, Barrett Dixon Bell; Patrick Coppens, a regulatory expert from European Advisory Services in Brussels and Cedric Bourges, owner of the French claims consultancy, NutraVeris, discussed claim making in the European Union.

They highlighted a definite socioeconomic bias occurring in the way consumers respond to healthy foods and healthy foods messaging.

“I think consumers do care about health claims,” ​said Dixon. “I think they are interested in finding ingredients, products, brands they can trust that will help there overall wellness or with a specific ailment. ​

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Tragedy​

“The tragedy of course is that the people that really need the help – that tend to be the poorer and the least educated are the ones who look at labels the least and tend to buy the cheaper products that have the health benefits.”​

Coppens backed the importance of health claims to signal healthy foods to consumers, but agreed that messaging was not necessarily reaching those people that could benefit from them the most.

“I think claims are important if you believe in it,” ​he said. “They should be justified but if consumers don’t care about their health then they will not care about a health message on a food. They will continue to eat an unbalanced diet. For people that are very conscious about their health, they will go looking for products that can improve their health and for them health messages are very important.”​

In an age where the internet has exploded the ways in which information can be attained by consumers, Dixon said the functional foods industry was not exaggerating the importance of on-product health claims, especially as claim making is brought under greater scrutiny than ever before by regulators.

“We all know what the quality of some of that information is like,” ​Dixon quipped, in reference to the proliferation of internet data. “I am not sure of the statistics but I am still surprised by how many people are looking at front-of-label and back-of-label when I go shopping.”​

Claim substantiation​

In terms of claims substantiation, Bourges said despite the raft of negative health claim opinions that has so far come in from the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA), the process was becoming more transparent, which should lead to more approved claims.

But he highlighted the ambiguity that can exist in claims making with a rejected claim that sought to link consumption of a hops-based supplement and breast shape.

“To have fuller, firmer breasts may increase your quality of life and therefore a case can be mounted that it can be a health claim?” ​he asked rhetorically.

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Look to NutraIngredients for more excerpts from this roundtable in coming days.