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The Food Programme

Traffic light labels

The Food Programme

BBC

Food, Arts

4.4977 Ratings

🗓️ 14 January 2013

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Traffic light labelling - whether red lights will stop us eating bad foods. Sheila Dillon investigates whether this year's change in food labelling will encourage us to improve our diet.Sue Davies from Which? explains the change to food labelling. This year a consistent system will be adopted across supermarkets. The labels will show a combination of guideline daily amounts, colour coding and "high, medium or low" wording will be used to show how much fat, salt and sugar and how many calories are in each product.Dr Mike Rayner has worked on a system like this since the 1980s. He celebrates this as a landmark year in public health, but thinks that the traffic light system still is not perfect.And New York Times columnist Mark Bittman describes his dream food label, which would also include details about animal welfare and how processed the food was.Presented by Sheila Dillon and produced by Emma Weatherill.

Transcript

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0:00.0

You're about to listen to a BBC podcast and I'd like to tell you a bit about the

0:03.8

podcast I work on. I'm Dan Clark and I commissioned factual podcasts at the BBC.

0:08.6

It's a massive area but I'd sum it up as stories to help us make sense of the forces shaping the world.

0:15.0

What podcasting does is give us the space and the time to take brilliant BBC journalism

0:20.0

and tell amazing compelling stories that really get behind the headlines.

0:23.7

And what I get really excited about is when we find a way of drawing you into a subject

0:28.3

you might not even have thought you were interested in.

0:30.2

Whether it's investigations, science, tech, politics, culture, true crime, the environment,

0:36.1

you can always discover more with a podcast on BBC Sounds.

0:39.7

Hello, I'm Sheila Dylan and welcome to this BBC download of the Food Program.

0:45.8

For information on the BBC's terms and conditions of use, visit

0:49.4

W.W. dot B.C. dot co-uk slash radio four.

0:56.4

You don't need me to tell you we're getting fatter.

0:59.1

It's back on the political agenda in a big way. Andy Burnham and the Labour Party want to cap sugar levels in cereals

1:07.0

and similar controls on salt and fat in other foods pitched at children.

1:11.0

Then the Department of Health has been piling on the

1:14.2

advice in the last few days with prime time TV ads urging us to cut the junk and

1:20.0

eat better.

1:21.0

Honestly, you, logs.

1:24.0

What are you putting into your bodies?

1:26.0

This is the amount of fat in that whole pizza.

1:29.0

Yuck!

...

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