REGULATION:AN ESTIMATED 1,500 lives could be saved each year in the Republic if food manufacturers were compelled to label clearly products which have high sugar, salt and fat content, the annual conference of the Irish Medical Organisation heard yesterday.
Prof Anthony Staines from the school of nursing at DCU said there had been a voluntary agreement between a number of major players in the food industry and the Food Safety Authority of Ireland to reduce the salt, sugar and trans fatty acid content of their foods over the past few years but progress on making reductions had been too slow and it was time now to make it mandatory through regulation. “It has taken much too long to do this and we need to bite the bullet,” he said.
He said high levels of salt consumption were a major cause of high blood pressure, stroke and heart disease, leading to hundreds of unnecessary deaths each year.
He added that food companies were profiting from these foods but not covering the costs of the consequences of their actions, just like the bankers and developers weren’t paying for their profiteering in the past. “The food industry profits and the rest of us pay the costs,” he said.
Current food labels were of little use to the average busy mother doing her best to feed a family on a limited budget, he said. They are designed to be helpful if you have a PhD in nutrition, he added.
Meanwhile members of the IMO attending the conference condemned the current shortage of community health doctors which is leading to an increased number of cases of late diagnosis of developmentally displaced hips in babies and other conditions such as undescended testes in young boys.
Dr Bridin Cannon, a public health doctor based in Cork, said this could lead to malignancy and damage fertility prospects.
“Community health doctors have been totally run down and pulled for everything and anything including all the vaccination programmes, which are really important, but we don’t have enough resources to cover everything,” she said.