European Parliament
Mitro Repo  (S&D ),
in writing.
(FI)
I voted in favour of this report as a matter of principle because I cannot accept the nutrition claim ‘now contains X% less of [nutrient]’. The labelling of products should not be misleading or ambiguous. This is especially important with food. The nutrition claim ‘now contains X% less of [nutrient]’ is questionable, since it allows for the nutritional values of a product to be compared only with a previous version of that product. It therefore does not take account of how high the nutrient’s starting level was. The risk is that what is, in fact, a very unhealthy product, can be made to sound healthy.
The claim ‘now contains X% less of [nutrient]’ is more a way to promote marketing than bring added value to consumer information. There are already claims regarding nutrient content on the market, such as ‘light/lite’ and ‘reduced [nutrient]’. The proposed nutrition claim would only cause additional confusion among consumers. For them, it is vitally important that labels on products are truthful and clearly comprehensible.

