A paradigm shift in packaged food
Promoting packaged food policies that increase access to healthier options and empower consumers.
Challenge
Packaged food is often high in salt, sugar and unhealthy fats, creating higher risk of heart disease. Healthy options are often sparse and hard to identify.
Solution
We work to create transparency around what’s really inside packaged food, restrict how food companies market unhealthy food, and support governments to limit salt content in products.
Impact
With healthier products and informed consumers, it’s easier to make healthy choices. One snack or meal at a time, diets improve and people live longer, healthier lives.
Why healthier packaged foods matter
Packaged foods high in salt, sugar, and unhealthy fats are now common worldwide—and over time their health effects add up to disabling heart attacks and strokes, and early death.
High salt intake alone causes nearly 2 million deaths each year, and salty packaged foods are a major culprit.
How healthier packaged food policies work
Governments can introduce mandatory policies to transform food environments to make healthy options the default choice. A comprehensive strategy where several policies work together will have the greatest impact on saving lives:
Salt targets for packaged food
Mandatory policies that limit how much salt can be in different types of packaged foods.
Front-of-package warning labels
Prominent warning labels on the front of food packages alert consumers to products high in salt or other unhealthy nutrients, helping them make healthier choices and reduce demand for unhealthy products, which also encourages manufacturers to reformulate.
Marketing restrictions
Restricting the marketing of healthy foods, particularly to children, helps promote healthy eating from the very start.
Fiscal policies
Taxes on unhealthy foods and subsidies for nutritious alternatives make healthier choices more accessible and affordable for everyone.
Encouraging use of lower-sodium salts
Food manufacturers can replace traditional salt in packaged food items with lower-sodium salt without altering taste.
Highlights
Preventing cardiovascular disease through salt reduction
An overview of RTSL’s approach to sodium reduction, including reducing salt in packaged foods.
Global Nutrition Database
An online, open access, centralized platform for category level packaged food data.
Policy brief: Front-of-package warning labels
Front-of-package labeling plays a critical role in combating diet-related noncommunicable diseases and saving millions in healthcare costs.
Sodium Reduction Framework
Recommended components of a comprehensive dietary sodium reduction program, implementation tools and other resources.
How RTSL supports healthier packaged foods
We support countries to develop a set of policies for packaged foods that works within their context. Here’s how:
Global tools and best practice guidance
Our experts have helped develop tools to guide countries as they take on policy development. For example, we supported WHO to develop global benchmarks for over 60 categories of packaged food, creating a common standard to inform countries as they set national-level targets for sodium reduction. We also supported PAHO’s Updated Regional Sodium Reduction Targets, which provides regional-specific targets for the Americas region.
With partners including Global Health Advocacy Incubator and Vital Strategies, we developed a set of best practices for nutrient profile models, which countries can use to establish thresholds for harmful nutrients and ingredients.
National action
Real change begins at the national level. We’re supporting our partners to develop and implement best practice packaged food policies. We support evidence generation—for example to conduct trials to determine the most effective front-of-package label for the local context. We provide technical support to partners—for example, guidance on adaptation of the WHO benchmarks into country-specific sodium targets. We also support policy advocacy and communications—for example, through our collaborations with Vital Strategies to implement mass media campaigns to support packaged food policy adoption.
Data for decisionmakers
With our Global Nutrition Database for Packaged Foods, researchers, advocates and decision makers can compare sodium, sugar, and saturated fat levels in packaged foods by category and country, and see how they stack up against WHO sodium benchmarks and country targets. This centralized database—the only resource of its kind—creates transparency around high levels of sugar, salt and saturated fat in popular food products, and can inform policies targeting packaged food and track country progress.
