The UPV/EHU's Nursing and Health Promotion research group compared seven nutrition labeling schemes in Europe, Oceania and South America and found that they barely coincide when specifying whether cooked foods are healthy. So the researchers concluded that a new system for assessing the food quality of ready meals needs to be developed. In response to growing concern about people's eating habits, governments around the world have implemented different nutrition labeling schemes to help consumers make healthy choices when shopping.
The UPV/EHU's Nursing and Health Promotion research group decided to go one step further. In view of the fact that we are eating out more and more, it raised the possibility that restaurants should also include information on their menus as to whether or not their dishes are healthy: "In the same way that they mark whether the recipes contain allergens or are suitable for vegans, we think it would be good to indicate whether they are healthy. "In this context, we wanted to find out whether any of the nutrition labeling systems that are already used globally to assess processed products could be valid for assessing cooked dishes.
"So we compared seven different methods and found so little consistency between them that we considered that none of them were suitable for our purpose," explained Leyre Gravina, the lead researcher of the study published in Nutrients . The research is novel given that the reproducibility and concordance of the labels global.