Junk foods, 70% of UK sales are due to unhealthy products

all 10 products The packaged products sold in the UK by the world’s most famous brands, seven of them are unhealthy from a nutritional point of view. And for some companies, the share of sales represented by fast food is even higher, over 80 or 90% for companies like Coca-Cola and Mondelēz, and as high as 100% for Ferrero. It is the result of a survey conducted by non-profit organizations Getting Nutrition Initiative NS ShareAction, which analyzed the nutritional quality of more than 4,000 packaged products made by the 16 largest companies in the world.

to judge The nutritional quality of the food, in place of British traffic light labels (which rate certain nutrients separately), the Health Star rating was used, a system used in Australia and New Zealand that gives each product a maximum of five stars. The foods and drinks analyzed had an average score of 2.2 stars: a product is considered healthy if it reaches at least 3.5 stars.

despite of The results leave much to be desired, however, the study found some progress compared to the first version of the survey, published in 2019. At that time, the percentage of sales represented by fast food was 78%, while it is now 71%. But the organizations explain that this progress is largely due to the major improvements made by some companies. Like Danone, which rose from 46 to 77% of health products, and PepsiCo, which rose from 26 to 50%. And while remaining in very modest shares of healthy products, even Nestle rose from 8 to 20%.

all the others Large multinationals remain essentially stable, such as Kellogg (70% of unhealthy foods), Mars (78%) and Mondelēz (96%), or even get worse, as sales of unhealthy products increase, such as Coca-Cola ( 83%) and Unilever (84%). Ferrero’s situation is also described as “stagnant”, as its sales continue and are represented by nutritionally unbalanced foods.

“And to encourage We see that nine companies have improved the health of their portfolios and that overall sales of health products have increased from 22 to 29%. – says Inge Krauer, executive director of the Access to Nutrition Initiative. – This shows that even in a relatively short period of time, producers can make progress with measures that introduce healthier varieties into their product range. However, the average health of foods from some of the biggest manufacturers selling in the UK is still concerning, with the average HEalth Star rating 2.2 out of 5 stars.“

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