Monitoring health and nutrition claims on food labels in Brazil

Carolina Kikuta; Camila Aparecida Borges; Ana Clara Duran

doi:10.3389/fnut.2024.1308110

Monitoring health and nutrition claims on food labels in Brazil

Front Nutr. 2024 Feb 7:11:1308110. doi: 10.3389/fnut.2024.1308110. eCollection 2024.

Authors

Carolina Kikuta¹, Camila Aparecida Borges², Ana Clara Duran^{2

3}

Affiliations

¹ Graduate Program in Public Health, Faculty of Medical Sciences, University of Campinas, São Paulo, Brazil.
² Center for Epidemiological Studies in Nutrition and Health, University of São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil.
³ Center for Food Studies and Research, University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil.

Abstract

Introduction: The monitoring of nutrition and health claims on food and beverage labels has been proposed by international and national organizations because it can collaborate with the development of public policies to regulate food labeling and marketing strategies. One way of carrying out this monitoring is by using data collected by private companies.

Objective: To compare information on nutrition and health claims available in a commercial database of a private company that monitors the launch of new foods and beverages in Brazilian food retailers with information on those same claims manually coded by trained research assistants.

Methods: This is a cross-sectional observational study using a data sample of newly launched food and beverages available at a commercial database from 2018 to 2021. We compared the information on health and nutrition claims available on the commercial dataset with reliable information on the same nutrition and health claims manually coded by trained research assistants using a tested taxonomy to classify such claims. We used Gwet's Kappa AC1 with 95% CI and percentage agreement to compare both data sources and calculated sensitivity and specificity of the compared data.

Results: A total of 6,722 foods and beverages were analyzed. Mintel-GNPD presented 36.28% (n = 2,439) of nutrition claims, while in the trained researchers' coding, it was 33.73% (n = 2,267). We found a prevalence of 5.4% (n = 362) for health claims in Mintel-GNPD and 10.8% (n = 723) in the researchers' coding. All subcategories of nutrition and health claims showed high agreement (Kappa >0.81). Health claims presented kappa = 0.89 with 33.7% sensitivity and 98.0% specificity while nutrition claims showed kappa = 0.86 with 92.9% sensitivity and 92.5% specificity.

Conclusion: Nutrition and health claims showed high agreement, with great results in nutrition claims, indicating that Mintel-GPND is suitable for monitoring such claims on food and beverage packaging in Brazil. Additionally, our findings show a high prevalence of nutrition and health claims on food packages launched in the Brazilian food retail, highlighting the need to monitor these to develop public policies to regulate food marketing on packaging in Brazil.

Keywords: food labeling; food packaging; health claims; nutrition claims; secondary data analysis.

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This research was funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies through a sub award agreement between the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Center for Epidemiological Studies in Nutrition and Health at the University of São Paulo (NUPENS-USP), grant number 5104695. The funder had no role in the study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.