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The Department of Health wants draconian, tobacco-style regulations for food product packaging.
Every time we go to the supermarket, there it is. Like drug pushers at the doors of a nightclub, merchandisers have placed rows of unhealthy sweets and snacks, loaded with toxic sugar, within easy reach of the average 10-year-old. There are rows of crisps, pork crackling, and other foods containing alarming amounts of fats and salts to tempt the unwary or the ill-disciplined off their government-approved diets.
It’s like they’re trying to kill us and trying to get our children addicted to food!
Taking some inspiration from the Department of Health’s approach to tobacco products, let’s impose strict regulations on unhealthy food, lest the poor, ignorant, helpless masses are misled into thinking two packets of crisps and a chocolate constitute a healthy lunch.
For a start, let’s put warning labels on food, in big, scary letters. “CONTAINS DEADLY SUGAR!” “CONTAINS OODLES OF GREASE!” “CONTAINS ENOUGH SALT TO GIVE YOUR NEIGHBOUR A STROKE!” “CONTAINS, WAIT FOR IT, ARTIFICIAL SWEETENERS!”
Then add some mandatory graphic images of medical conditions that could be caused by said food, for shock value. The idea is, after all, to discourage people from buying and eating delicious but unhealthy snacks.
Finally, we tell the retailers to cover all their shelves, so people have to request the products that they want from store staff. That way, they won’t be swayed by malicious and underhanded merchandising techniques perfected by greedy capitalist corporations, such as perfidiously displaying products for sale.
I’ve taken the liberty to assist the Department of Health with a mockup of what a typical unhealthy food product might look like.
This is, of course satire. I made at least some of this image up.
I don’t think food manufacturers are malicious. I don’t think they’re trying to kill us or give us diabetes. I don’t think food should come with warning labels. And I certainly don’t think government is qualified to determine what is or isn’t healthy for any given person on any given diet.
Not funny
I wasn’t exaggerating by much, though. As it turns out, my attempt at satire isn’t very funny.
There is public lobbying support for so-called front-of-package labelling for products with added sugar, saturated fat, or salt.
Those triangular warning icons are straight from a massive tome of regulations – replacing the existing 51-page labelling regulation with a new 249-page regulation (R3337) – which will dictate the packaging and labelling of foodstuffs in minute, excruciating detail.
In fact, I’m late to this party: the deadline for comments (by email to foodcontrol@health.gov.za) is 21 July 2023, a mere week from now.
The pro-labelling lobby, which claims, ‘many of us don’t realise that some food products we buy threaten our health,’ as if we’re idiots, has been campaigning to get people to send form letters to the Department of Health telling it to be even stricter.
The new regulations prescribe, word-for-word, what claims may be made on food packaging.
Homocysteine, in simple English
If your product contains at least 500mg of betaine monohydrate per serving, for example, you are allowed to put ‘Betaine contributes to normal homocysteine metabolism’ on your packaging.
Because people who don’t know too much sugar isn’t good for you are definitely going to know what ‘homocysteine metabolism’ is. (I looked it up, and I have no idea what it is; something to do with sulphur.)
You must then also inform the prospective buyer ‘that the beneficial effect is obtained with a daily intake of 1.5g of betaine’, and ‘that the daily intake in excess of 4g may significantly increase blood cholesterol levels’, and that ‘at least three of the following foodstuffs … naturally contain betaine: shellfish, spinach, wheat germ and bran, sugar beets’.
Food companies are going to have to make big, big boxes, because essays like this are required for an endless list of ingredients.
Here’s another one: ‘Choline contributes to normal lipid metabolism.’
Like people who don’t know to avoid too much saturated fat are definitely going to know what ‘lipid’ means.
For wholegrain foods, you may not say that it is good for you. If you say anything, you must say, ‘Diets rich in wholegrain foods and other plant foods that are low in total fat, saturated fatty acids and cholesterol may reduce the risk of most chronic diseases of lifestyle such as heart disease, diabetes and certain cancers and can assist with weight management and gastrointestinal health’.
Because consumers are totes going to read a book-length treatise on the benefits of fibre before they decide on which breakfast cereal to buy.
Package inserts
Perhaps they can make food package inserts, like the pharmaceutical industry does with medicines but tie them on the outside of boxes with little ribbons, so that shoppers can easily read them before buying.
Manufacturers should take care, however, because there’s a separate list of health claims that they are permitted to make, and they don’t include that a product is ‘healthy’.
And all of them are very wordy descriptions that must be used word-for-word. No deviation from the prescribed ‘permitted wording’ is allowed.
If your product comes in a small wrapper, like sugar-free chewing gum, you’d better package it on a huge cardboard backer to make space for the permitted health claims.
Claims about weight loss are almost entirely banned by the new regulations. It doesn’t matter if your yoghurt is low-fat, or your rice cakes are sugar-free. Claims about weight loss may only be made on a ‘formulated meal replacement’, which is ‘a foodstuff, in powder or liquid form, specifically designed to replace one or more daily meals for the purpose of weight loss’.
If you do sell such a meal replacement, you must also state, in big, bold capital letters (yes, that is specified) that it is ‘ONLY EFFECTIVE AS PART OF AN ENERGY AND SERVING OR PORTION CONTROLLED PRUDENT DIET AND AN INCREASE IN MODERATE PHYSICAL ACTIVITY’.
Health claims
You may also not simply state an ingredient on the packaging, other than in the list of ingredients. If you in any way emphasise it, it is considered to be a health claim, and must comply with the specific conditions and wording contained in the regulation.
If your trademarks implicitly contain health claims, or the word ‘health’ or ‘healthy’ itself, it will now be verboten.
Futurelife, I hate to break it to you, but just about every word on your entire box will be illegal if this regulation passes.
In fact, the word ‘smart’ is explicitly prohibited, along with ‘wholesome’, ‘nutritious’, ‘nutraceutical,’ or ‘super-food’.
There’s an entire section just banning that little ‘ModuCare’ logo at the bottom and the ingredient that it represents: ‘A person may not… include as an ingredient in a foodstuff a complementary medicine which is sold independently, and use the brand name of the complementary medicine to indicate its presence in the list of ingredients or anywhere else on the label.’
Some so-called ‘health foods’ will be outright prohibited by these regulations if they contain ingredients that are not on the list of government-approved herbs and spices or are on the explicit list of prohibited herbs and spices.
Warning labels
All foods containing sugar, saturated fatty acids or sodium (salt) over a given threshold, or contain any artificial sweeteners, regardless of the safety profile of such sweeteners, must be sold with a massive warning label on the front of the packaging. This label must occupy at least 25% of the surface area of the ‘principal display panel’ (which is also defined in excruciating detail).
Products requiring such a front-of-pack warning label may not be marketed to children. There will be extensive marketing restrictions on such products, prohibiting, for example, pictures of happy families, celebrities, or sports stars, or the use of competitions, collectables, or gifts.
Nothing that could make the product attractive to children will be permitted.
The warning labels or prescribed warning text must be repeated – audibly or in black on white in big, bold capital letters – in all advertising of these products, a la cigarette advertising.
Logos for products like soft drinks and crisps, which will all require the front-of-pack label, may not appear on any footwear, shirts, or other merchandising.
Myriad regulations
There are a myriad of regulations about letter sizes, letter colours, and the exact locations of various descriptive bits of wording, depending on the size and shape of packaging.
Vegan and vegetarian products won’t be allowed to use ‘deceptive’ names like ‘burger’ or ‘sausage’. In fact, the word ‘vegan’ itself appears not to be permitted. The word ‘vegetarian’ is defined to mean what I understand vegan to mean, namely that all ingredients in the product are ‘of multi-cellular plant, fungal, algal, and bacterial origin’. Less strictly vegetarian products must use a qualifying prefix, such as lacto-, ovo- or honey-vegetarian.
Pictorial representations of food will be heavily restricted. Meat products, for example, may not depict happy cows or pigs, since that would be misleading about the living conditions of the animals.
Testimonials and endorsements will be heavily restricted, if not prohibited entirely.
Ingredient labels will become much longer, since the purpose of every additive has to be described in long-winded plain English. For example, a single anti-oxidant compound must be listed as ‘anti-oxidant as an additive:’ followed by the compound name.
True love
Here’s what the gift of true love will look like, if the Health Minister has his way:
I can’t adequately convey the extraordinary detail and draconian rigidity of all 249 pages of Regulation 3337. It is a monument to the authoritarian nanny-state.
The legal basis for all this malarkey, established by court precedent concerning tobacco advertising, is that public health overrides the right to free speech.
In the case of clearly misleading claims, I’d agree, since they would constitute fraud, but these regulations go far, far beyond that.
They grossly violate the rights of companies to market pleasurable foods to consumers.
Everyone knows that stuffing yourself with crisps or chocolates isn’t good for you. We don’t need the state to make product packaging scary and unattractive and prohibit much of the marketing of these products.
Terrible record
Governments have a terrible record of regulating healthy diets. In fact, the primary cause of the high sugar content in today’s foods is that governments the world over issued guidelines almost half a century ago declaring that low-fat food was the way to a slimmer waistline.
It wasn’t, and those guidelines mark a sharp inflection point in the rise of today’s obesity epidemic. It was, in the words of Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health nutrition expert David Ludwig, a ‘failed experiment’.
Likewise, there is limited evidence that moderate amounts of salt is bad, even for people who already have high blood pressure. It is entirely harmless for people who do not have high blood pressure.
Twelve years ago, Scientific American declared that it was time to end the war on salt. Here we are, with the Department of Health dictating dietary requirements that are long obsolete.
Public health advice concerning sugar ought to be given directly to consumers, through communication and education campaigns. This will enable consumers to make their own choices.
People who are not overweight, and do not consume excessive sugar in their diet, don’t need to be guilt-tripped at the expense of food manufacturers every time they enjoy a sweet treat.
Fads and fashions
This is also the thin end of the wedge for other diet fads and pseudoscience fashions.
The regulation already treats additives as if they’re toxins, in accordance with a myth originally established by Dr. Benjamin Feingold back in 1973, when he (mistakenly) linked food colouring to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder in children.
Although some preservatives can be allergenic, the misconception that they’re inherently bad for your health is a myth. They make food healthier by giving it a longer shelf life and protecting it against spoilage.
This is especially important in a country with a poverty rate of over 50%, since not everyone can afford refrigerators, or the electricity to run them.
The anti-GMO crowd want the presence of genetically modified foods labelled on the package. They’re not content with marketing their own products as GMO-free, but seek to perpetuate a baseless fear of GMOs by requiring their presence to be labelled.
Cancer, ahoy!
Next, we’ll get California-style cancer warnings on our food, just because the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) categorised something as a possible carcinogen, as it did with red meat and (wait for it…) hot water.
The IARC has only ever found a single substance to be probably not carcinogenic to humans, and it was probably wrong about that. For half of all tested substances it had insufficient evidence, and the other half all fell into the possible, probable or definite carcinogen categories.
As I explained in this article, the problem with this approach is that the IARC does not base its categorisations on the degree of risk. It measures the strength of the evidence for any degree of risk, even a very small risk.
The latest substance to fall victim to the IARC classifications is aspartame, which is about to be classified as a possible carcinogen. That puts it in the same category as hot water, and, according to Reuters, to ‘whole-leaf extract aloe vera and some pickled vegetables’. It also reports how weak the evidence for such a claim really is.
If a lifetime of consumption of a given foodstuff (like aspartame) increases the lifetime risk of, say, colorectal cancer, from 4.35% to 4.40%, the IARC would stick a ‘possibly carcinogenic’ label on it.
Normal people, however, would consider the fact that the risk of a lifetime of consuming sugar, instead, is far, far higher.
Slippery slope
The Department of Health’s authoritarian, micro-managing approach to food and food labelling is a slippery slope for all sorts of special interests and quackery.
Dietary scientists will openly tell you how little they really know, and how hard it is to research diet, given the panoply of confounding factors and genetic differences between people.
You can’t put people in a lab under controlled conditions for a few decades, and in any study longer than a few months you have to rely on their self-reported food consumption. It is not a subject that lends itself to confident scientific opinion.
Yet here the government is, producing strict, detailed regulations about what health claims are and are not permissible on food products. It’s absurd, really.
Food inflation
This regulation will stifle innovation. The restrictive and prescriptive detail of the regulation will make it almost impossible for existing manufacturers to introduce novel food products to the market.
Regulation 3337 will also raise the barrier to entry for new would-be food producers.
For an informal (and arguably illegal) cottage-industry maker of preserves, cooked meals, sandwiches, or sauces, to grow into a formal commercial operation, is extraordinarily expensive. It involves elaborate food testing protocols to determine the nutritional contents that must go on a product label by law.
It involves employing lawyers who can read and understand all 249 pages of this particular regulation, plus the reams of other food-related legislation that’s out there.
Burdensome regulations such as these raise the cost of food both by increasing the expense of determining nutritional content, and by deterring competition in the food industry.
With South African food inflation bucking the international trend by rising to a 14-year high of 14.4% in March, dumping a heavy pile of ill-considered new regulations on the industry is not just bad for the food industry, but terrible for food consumers.
The poor, as usual, will be hardest hit by the government’s persistent efforts to knee-cap private sector business.
Regulation 3337 is a command-economy abomination, and should be withdrawn entirely. Make your voice heard before 12 July 2023, at foodcontrol@health.gov.za.
PS: All due apologies to the manufacturers featured in the mock-up images, who were chosen simply because they are popular and served well for purposes of illustration. I intended to express no negative opinion of these products, and do not for a moment believe they will give you gangrene.
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