Government’s smart swaps aren't so smart

Related tags Nutrition Butter Milk

Clare Cheney, director general, Provision Trade Federation
Clare Cheney, director general, Provision Trade Federation
I was going to write about sugar being the new salt for the healthy diet campaigners. But I changed my mind when I looked at the government’s Change4Life so-called Smart Swaps online. What a muddle!

Putting myself in the position of a consumer, I would be utterly confused as to how to follow the advice for the butter and cheese swaps. Those moving from sugary cereal to sugar-free cereal and sugary drinks to sugar-free drinks are comprehensible because they relate to normal portion sizes: a bowl of cereal or a can of drink.

But not so for butter and cheese, where the information is only provided for 250gm blocks when swapping to reduced-fat versions. Who eats a 250gm block of cheese, let alone butter, in a day?

Change4Life trumpets that we will save 29gm of fat and 261 calories by replacing 250gm of cheese with 250gm of reduced-fat cheese. That sounds exciting, until you realise 250gm equates to eight normal 30gm servings for each of which the saving would be 3.6gm of fat and 32.6 calories.

The butter to low-fat spread swap is equally misleading. The energy saving per 250gm is given as a whopping 976.5 calories. But no mention is made of the saving associated with a normal 7gm serving, which is only 27 calories or 0.32 gm of fat.

Frighten

Rather than advise people as to what they can eat if they stick to normal portions, Change4Life is more likely to frighten some into avoiding dairy products altogether. It is not the Department of Health’s role to care about the dairy farmers. That is the job of the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs, but it wasn't consulted on the campaign. Joined up government continues to elude successive regimes, it seems!

Why did Change4Life single out these particular categories? It seems to have something to do with the availability of vouchers. But these will do little to provide a long-term incentive for the population to eat healthily and control portion sizes.

Instead the government is wasting money on this unbalanced and misleading guidance, which is merely tinkering at the edges of the obesity crisis, does not provide meaningful advice to consumers, and risks damaging the reputation of dairy foods as a healthy and tasty part of a balanced diet.

Finally, readers with GCSEs in maths may notice that Change4Life talks about grams of fat saved in one place and suddenly switches to millilitres of fat in another. Thus, for spreads, the saving is called 108.5gm in one place and 121ml later on. Or am I being pedantic?

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