FSA's nutrient model is 'fundamentally flawed'

The final nutrient profiling model designed by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to improve children's diets by reducing the amount of junk food advertising directed at them, has been widely criticised.

The model was developed as a tool for categorising foods on the basis of their nutrient content with the aim of tightening the rules on TV advertising of foods that are high in salt, sugar and saturated fat. It has now been given to communications industry regulator, Ofcom.

Martin Paterson, deputy director general of the Food and Drink Federation, who dismissed the FSA's previous versions as "subjective and having no rational scientific basis", said: "The final model does not allow any foods which exceed a set threshold for saturated fat, energy, sodium or sugar, to score points for the protein they contain unless they meet other artificial criteria. We will be studying the model urgently. We do not know what the detailed effects of the latest changes will be and neither, we believe, does the board of the FSA."

The underlying premise of the FSA's model was fundamentally flawed, Paterson added. "Any attempt to assess the nutritional worth of a food using a universal nutrition profiling model conflicts with the principle that it is the combinations of foods eaten and the amounts consumed that is important, not the nutrient content of 100g of those individual foods.

"It is completely unscientific to use one model to create and compare the scores of ingredients, meals, composite foods and foods eaten in different quantities by consumers. No model can possibly address obesity, heart disease, blood pressure, and take into account the balance of the diet, with any credibility by according a particular score to individual foods."