The big six fast food chains seen on high streets in the UK: Burger King, KFC, McDonald’s, Nando’s, Subway and Wimpy have promised to make changes that make it easier for people to eat healthy restaurant meals.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) wants to see more fruit, vegetables and salad on menus and for less dominance of fried food.
According to a report in the Daily Mail, the FSA estimates that the UK diet has 20 per cent too much saturated fat, and this contributes to the 200,000 deaths a year from heart disease.
Earlier this year a Cabinet Office report said that if people if the average UK diet matched the country’s nutritional guidelines on healthy eating about 70,000 fewer people would die prematurely.
The FSA aims to reduce the proportion of the average UK person’s daily energy intake that comes from saturated fat from 13.3 to 11 per cent by the year 2010, preventing 3,500 premature deaths every year.
The FSA has no power to force restaurants to follow these aims and has to rely on “naming and shaming” as a way to put pressure on.
The Agency said that in 2009 the six fast food companies will be starting individual projects to help their customers choose and eat a more balanced diet. And they have promised to update the FSA every six months on progress.
The FSA’s Head of Nutrition, Rosemary Hignett said in a statement that:
“Eating out should be fun and we don’t want to change that, but we believe restaurants can help make it easier for us to take healthier choices when dining out.”
The projects include:
- Reducing salt and saturated fats.
- Changing sauces, dressings and frying oils to alternatives that contain less saturated fat.
- Increasing healthier choices on menus.
- Giving customers more nutritional information.
Hignett said she hoped other restaurant chains will follow this lead. The FSA is also working with pub companies, family restaurant and coffee shop chains to come up with similar plans.
The Agency said that so far its work with leading workplace caterer’s in the UK has resulted in “positive changes to more than 1.6 million meals served in the workplace every day”.
Dame Deirdre Hutton, who chairs the FSA said consumers are used to seeing nutritional information in supermarkets and the Agency wants to give them the same opportunity to make informed choices about meals when they eat out as well.
According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, last year the major supermarket chains like Sainsbury’s, Waitrose, Asda and the Cooperative Group agreed to using a colour coded “traffic light” system to show more nutritional information on packaged food: Tesco have implemented a different scheme.
It will be much harder for the small independent restaurants to show nutritional information on their menus, said the newspaper.
Sources: FSA, Daily Mail, Telegraph.
Written by: Catharine Paddock, PhD