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NewsDay

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Poor food labels a health threat

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Stakeholders in the health sector are alarmed by the influx of food and breast milk substitutes that bear labels often written in foreign languages, a situation which raises serious public health risks.

Stakeholders in the health sector are alarmed by the influx of food and breast milk substitutes that bear labels often written in foreign languages, a situation which raises serious public health risks.

By Phyllis Mbanje

This was unearthed during an assessment by the Training and Research Support Centre (TARSC) community-based research and training programme which sought to determine the level of compliance with provisions of the Food and Food Standards Regulations.

“The country has food labelling (including for breast milk substitutes and infant nutrition) regulations, but monitoring and enforcing these is difficult because we are a net importer of food items,” Artwell Kadungure, from TARSC, said.

The context for monitoring and enforcing regulations on food is complicated because in Zimbabwe there is a large and growing liberalised informal sector as well as staff shortfalls in the public sector who should be carrying out the monitoring.

“For instance, we had a NAN formular tin that was written in Portuguese only. How then will the consumer know what it contains and ingredients used?” he queried.

According to the assessment, 5% of the labels were not in English which is quite significant, given susceptibility of infants if the product is not prepared, stored and fed to the baby in the correct manner.

During a recent forum on universal health coverage, stakeholders called for enforcement of public health laws which include food labelling to effectively curb public health problems. “Food safety depends on effective enforcement of legal measures to protect the public against risks,” Kadungure said. Of concern, according to the research, was that in relation to breast milk substitutes, nearly a third of the labels were easily separable from the container, and did not make clear that the product was a supplement to and not a replacement to breast milk, especially in imported products.

This is despite the fact that in Zimbabwe, ensuring exclusive breastfeeding is still one of the key challenges. One in 10 of the products did not state the age at which the product should be introduced and did not have messages on the superiority of breast milk, while a third did not have a message on the importance of breast milk in preventing diarrhoea and other illnesses.

The World Health Organisation’s Global Strategy on Diet notes that consumers require accurate, standardised and comprehensible information on the content of food items in order to make healthy choices.

This right to knowledge is also enshrined in the United Nations statutes through the “Guidelines for Consumer Protection” adopted in 1985