The UK Foods Standards Agency wants the manufacturers of cholocate bars to voluntarily reduce the size of their products by one fifth in order to reduce daily calorie intake and help fight what is described as an obesity ‘epidemic’.
If they hadn’t noticed, manufacturers have regularly been reducing the size of chocolate bars over the years and without a corresponding reduction in price! And wouldn’t people just eat two bars instead of one?
By 2012, the watchdog wants all confectionary to weigh no more than 50g (Mars bars are currently 58g and Bounty bars 57g) and they also want manufacturers to sell bite-size bars as single items rather than as part of multibags. Won’t people then just buy a bagfull?
Other recommendations include a proposal that within six years, fizzy drinks should be sold in 250 ml containers instead of standard 330ml and that within three years, ‘added sugar’ levels be reduced by 4%.
Obesity may be a problem, but these sort of measures are highly unlikely to do anything more than increase the profits of the manufactures.
Educate people to eat more healthily, fine, a great idea, but just making the chocolate bar smaller can’t be the answer. Those who like chocolate, be they obese or not, will just end up buying more bars!
This article is quite interesting! A few good quotes.