“For the second time this year, the EU Commission offered a high level platform to a group of six multinationals to present and hence promote their own nutrition labeling scheme,” Anton said.
“I know we’re not the only ones questioning the EU Commission leaving the leadership in this dossier to national authorities or to six multinationals: basically, all these schemes may well be very sophisticated, but they’re not based on all relevant science on diets and do in no way reflect common sense.”
‘Seriously nonsense’
The multinationals – The Coca-Cola Company, Mars, Mondelez International, Nestlé, PepsiCo, and Unilever – are putting forward the Evolved Nutrition Labelling (ENL) Initiative, which promotes the traffic light label system.
Anton said that nutrition labeling schemes where a diet soft drink ranks healthier than drinking milk “are obviously and seriously nonsense.”
Anton said he protested and urged the EU Commission to stop any such scheme in place like the UK traffic light and to stop any direct or indirect support for any nutrition labeling schemes that fail what he called the ‘diet soft drink vs drinking milk’ test.
The EDA recently said the ENL scheme is not adequate for providing information on the global nutritional properties of milk and dairy products.