The study by the Portuguese Institute of Marketing Administration conducted on behalf of the DGS and validated by the World Health Organisation, was carried out based on a sample of 1,127 consumers and will be issued on Monday, which is also World Food Day.
The aim was to understand how clearly consumers understood the information on food labels.
More than half of the consumers surveyed, look at food labels to see the expiry date, how to use that particular product and to understand the nutritional information. However when the results were analysed, 40 percent did not understand the information given.
The study also concluded that the more qualified a consumer is, the more chance they have of understanding the label. In fact, one of the barriers to understanding information on food labels is low levels of literacy among the Portuguese population leading to difficulty in understanding the nutritional information, said the authors of the study.
The analysis has raised the question of how information is presented on the labels, said the director of the National Programme for the promotion of healthy eating of the DGS.
As a solution, the DGS launched a “traffic light” system categorising food into red, yellow and green. Consumers are encouraged to opt for food and drinks labelled as green and to avoid those with the red labels.