Food labels are fiction

Nearly all the food products in your shopping trolley don't do what they say on the tin. Nothing like in some cases. 

Six out of every seven packets or tins have got the wrong labels on them according to Which? magazine. Nearly one in five are completely inaccurate.

The nutrition values on the labels on processed food can be worked out in different ways. None of these are 100% accurate so the law allows a massive margin of error of 20% and sometimes even 30%. Despite this massive margin, 17% of food labels still fell outside it. In other words some nutritional claims are over 30% inaccurate. Or, put another way, next to useless.

Here are some examples from Which's research:

• some wafers contained nearly three times more saturated fat than stated on the label.
• a prepared joint of beef contained 90 per cent more fat and 70 per cent more saturates than the label said. With 4.8g of fat per 100g, it certainly couldn't be described as 'less than 3 per cent fat', as the label claimed.
• a brand of Light Trifles aren't as 'light' as they say; Which? found 23 per cent more fat in the sample - an extra 1.7g of fat per pot.
• a supermarket's Hot Dog Pizza aimed at kid promised 'controlled sugar' on the label - but Which? found 47 per cent more sugar than claimed.

Malcolm Coles, editor of Which?, said: 'Nutrition labels help people compare foods and make healthy choices, but only if they're accurate. How can you trust what you're eating when so many labels fall outside even the fairly generous margins of error allowed?'

Good question.

Every year the British eat 10,000,000,000 - ten billion - packets of crisps — more than all the rest of western Europe put together. Applying Which's stats to crisps, as many as 9,300,000,000 of these are wrongly labelled. With 1,700,000,000 widely inaccurate. Gulp.

• More from malehealth on how the UK food industry is affecting your health.
• More on the health eating campaign from Which.