Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-05-15-Speech-1-122"
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"en.20060515.16.1-122"2
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"Mr President, in the context of the concerns and wider debate on combating obesity and other chronic diseases, the Nutrition and Health Claims Regulation, based on nutrient profiling, will have absolutely no impact. It will in fact do damage from a health education point of view, as nutrient profiles are solely based on the composition of a food or food category and do not take into consideration the consumption of the food or food category or consumers’ individual habits.
The effect of a food containing a substance such as sugar or salt at a low or medium level, but consumed in great quantities, is much more damaging than that of a food containing a substance at a high level but consumed only occasionally. Interestingly, scientists have now established that obese children and young people do not actually consume more junk food than children of healthy body weight, but their lifestyle contains a serious deficit of physical activity. Establishing objective and science-based nutrient profiles may prove an impossible task and the European Food Safety Authority will have its work cut out. Against that background, any policies based on such profiles are likely to be incoherent and lead to arbitrary decisions.
It is a central tenet of the Lisbon Agenda that legislation should be simple, clear and enforceable. Instead of accepting compromises for the sake of political expediency, we should send this Monday morning directive back for redrafting under the better regulation initiative. We should ensure that it is in step with scientific best practice in this area, with minimum red tape, that it is SME- and consumer-friendly and, most importantly, that it does what it says on the tin, i.e. it becomes a tool to help combat obesity and other chronic diseases.
With regard to the regulation on addition of vitamins and minerals and the so-called ‘certain other substances’ to food, I feel very strongly that mass medication of the population at large, through the addition of substances to publicly supplied basic necessities such as drinking water, is ethically questionable and should not be permitted, particularly if it cannot be scientifically proven that the health of sensitive groups within the population is not adversely affected by such an addition. For example, the addition of fluoride to drinking water has a disproportionately negative effect on bottle-fed babies and young children, as their reconstituted milk formula made from that public drinking water equates to their total diet."@en1
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