Dear Minister,
it is the duty of our Institute – which has always been committed to promoting scientific research in support of policies for innovation and sustainability – to inform your Government of a story that risks compromising science and the authority of the institutions who represent it internationally.
The World Health Organization (WHO), through the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), has recently published a new report entitled “The Nutri-Score: A Science-Based Front-of-Pack Nutrition Label”, with which it promotes Nutriscore as a label that directs consumers towards healthy food choices and, therefore, towards a reduction in the risk of developing non-communicable diseases such as cancer.
However, both the title and the conclusion of the research are misleading as no studies have been carried out on the correlation between Nutriscore, food consumption patterns, and diagnostics of noncommunicable diseases. The report is in fact based on the Epic (European Prospective Investigation into Cancer and Nutrition) study which, since 1992, has been tracking the food consumption and medical history of more than 500,000 European citizens.
Already in 2018 an article was published that applied ex-post the French nutritional profile FSAm-NPS to foods consumed over time by Epic participants, and which therefore correlated the consumption of healthy foods with a lower probability of developing cancer.
Since FSAm-NPS is the algorithm on which the Nutriscore relies to assign its judgments, both this study and the IARC conclude that Nutriscore is the most effective label in the fight against cancer.
A series of doubts emerges about the validity of the thesis. First of all, as already stated, no research on which the report is based directly correlates the Nutriscore label and the development of non-communicable diseases. It could have, given that the label was only developed in 2017 and implemented in even more recent years. It is therefore not possible to know whether or how the consumption patterns of the Epic subjects would be influenced by the presence of the Nutriscore label on foods, making any conclusion in this regard speculative.
Furthermore, the 2018 study is not of a comparative type and does not compare other nutritional evaluation systems with the FSAm-NPS one: it cannot therefore conclude that other labels are less effective than Nutriscore in the fight against cancer.
The implementation of a front-pack nutritional label is a matter of not only political, but also and above all medical importance. It is therefore important that the debate is rooted in full-blown, non-speculative scientific evidence, especially when it promises beneficial effects against the development of terminal illnesses. In this regard, it is surprising that the IARC website opens today with an image of the Nutriscore, without contextualization or mention of the title of the report, giving the idea of ​​a sudden and unappealable endorsement.
For all this we turn to you, Minister, to clarify the position taken by both the IARC and the WHO. A strategic choice that seems not at all adopted on the basis of scientificity as well as of collegial decision-making – a principle that should be the cornerstone of the work of any OG.
In such a delicate moment, with the dossier on Farm to Fork being defined in Europe, this is a case that risks creating a precedent, with a significant impact on international policies aimed at making nutrition and education more sustainable. nourishing people and whose modus operandi has always been carried out under the banner of collegiality and the sharing of strategies and objectives.
Prof. Pietro Paganini, president Competere
