06 February 2015 - The Conversation - Food fight: is business trying to game the five-a-day system?

The public needs consistency and clarity about how five-a-day is applied to products. However there is a fine balance between lowering the thresholds of eligibility to encourage more manufacturers and retailers to use the official logo, versus endorsing products which generally take consumers further away from a “healthy balanced diet”.

Public Health England (PHE), an executive arm of the Department of Health, is consulting with an “external reference group” of non-governmental organisations and manufacturers, and has drafted proposals to put to the group for a meeting on the February 20 (2015). These proposals include limits on how much fat, sugar and salt foods carrying the official logo could contain. These might provide some safeguards, but we are still in danger of losing sight of the change that the five-a-day health campaign set out to achieve.