More than a year after the regulation of the Law for the Promotion of Healthy Eating, which establishes the obligation to report excess sugar, fat, calories and sodium in food and beverages, the panorama of Argentine gondolas changed considerably. The black octagons are beginning to populate most of the packaging, the characters that promote their sale are disappearing and the debate is burning in the social networkswhile some suggestive delays persist.
“Multinationals like Arcor, cañuelas, the serenissima either Rio de la Plata mills They are the ones that adhere the most to compliance,” he told the agency. ANCCOM -of the career of communication of the UBA– company sources POS, in charge of replacement services. Most of the non-compliance falls for now on SMEs and the brands of the supermarkets.
Due to black labels, one in four people stopped consuming a type of food
The standard regularly seeks the promotion and advertising of unhealthy products, avoiding misleading marketing strategies or campaigns. “The lack of clear information on the label pushes the overweight epidemic and childhood obesity”, had announced UNICEF before the sanction. 13% of children under five years of age in Argentina are overweight, a figure that reaches 65% among those of legal age. Along with obesity, high blood pressure and high blood glucose are the main risk factors derived from poor nutrition, responsible for 140,000 deaths per year in the country.
The big companies, which put up a stiff resistance during the debate, are now focused on devising strategies to preserve their sales. One of them would be to add a QR code on the label, with information on nutritional qualities, as a “balance”; another, to modify the nutritional table that includes the packages to make it clearer and more informative; the last one is more disruptive: offering the same product with and without the seal (that is, with and without the ingredient that makes it unhealthy), so that everyone can make their purchase decision. But in full negotiations on the electoral assemblypolitics does not seem willing to reopen the discussion about the octagons that are already changing the eating habits of a good part of Argentines.
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