Sunday 14 March 2010

Healthy or full of fat and salt...?

Rate these foods: healthy /unhealthy ?
  • Jordans Country Crisp
  • Fox's Butter Crunch Crinkles
  • Danone Activia intensely creamy yogurt
  • Kellogg's Cornflakes
  • Heinz Baked Beans
  • McVitie's Hobnobs
The answers can be found in an article from The Independent

'the Food Standards Agency's has dropped its insistence that manufacturers use 'traffic light' colours as part of efforts to reduce obesity, heart disease and other diet-related illnessess'

This 'compromise' opens the gate for supermarkets to use much less transparent methods for identifying health /unhealthy foods for example, using percentages to show the amount of salt and fat
in the food.
I've been exploring convenience foods with my students and we needed to have a simple way to know if the food was healthy.
We started with McCains chips. (cooking schedule to download)
McCains use the easy to understand traffic lights system and we could all understand that green meant yes its good, amber be careful and red don't eat it very often.

Download our information sheet





Download our worksheet



We had made a good start but we weren't so lucky with our future purchases and we just couldn't tell if the microwave meals were healthy or not.

The full implementation of the food labelling traffic light system from the Food Standards agency would have been a great tool to help everyone make healthy choices. We all need the traffic lights!

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