In Ravenna, one of Salvini’s supporters in the crowd asked him if he was not cold and added that he should be eating the chocolate spread Nutella to stay warm. However, the leader of the League responded sternly: “Nutella? But does the lady know that I have changed? Because I discovered that for Nutella they use Turkish hazelnuts, and I prefer to help companies that use Italian products, I prefer to eat Italian, help Italian farmers”.
Italy has recently been challenged directly by Brussels, with threats against Made in Italy. According to Brussels, Italian food is bad. The message was contained in the EU’s secret dossier, according to which the healthiest diet is Coke and Red Bull. As long as they are light or without sugar.
The problem is that this dossier creates a prejudice about food regardless of the quantity consumed and how it is inserted in the context of a diet. The result is that Coca Cola light is seen as “good” and pork is seen as “bad”. But this would only make sense if one was eating whole meals made exclusively of bacon.
Thus conceived, the proposed system is an attack against the tried and tested Mediterranean diet that wisely mixes in fresh ingredients with products typically made in Italy, which have also been a great resource for Italian exports.
On the subject, Salvini declared: “There is another negotiation held hidden in Brussels, the one called Nutriscore. A seal on foods with red, yellow or green dots to say those that do good or bad. [Italian] foods like olive oil or San Daniele ham or Pecorino Romano cheese would have a red light. It is a secret paper. It is a crazy nonsense.”
In order to fight obesity, Green and socialist MEPs have supported a mandatory food-labelling scheme to be introduced across the EU.
EU laws do not allow countries to unilaterally impose their own food labelling system, therefore they can only give recommendations.
Nutriscore, also known as the 5-Colour Nutrition label or 5-CNL, is a nutrition label that was selected by the French government in March 2017 to be displayed on food products after it was compared against several labels proposed by industry or retailers.
It relies on the computation of a nutrient profiling system derived from the United Kingdom Food Standards Agency nutrient profiling system (FSA score). It’s been also recommended by Belgian, Spanish, German and Dutch authorities as well as the European Commission and the World Health Organization. It was created by Santé Publique France, the French public health agency.
The EU believes that is is the most efficient in conveying information on the nutritional quality of foods, but the consumption of sweetened beverages – even those which do not contain sugar – has increased dramatically in the past decades, in parallel with increasing prevalences of overweight and obesity in the United States.
Currently, sweet soft drinks contribute to almost 10 percent of total energy intake in both children and adults despite that fact that these drinks have no nutritional value.
Nutriscore is given for a particular food item in one of five classification letters, with ‘A’ being a preferable score and ‘E’ being a detrimental score. The calculation of the score involves only seven different parameters of nutrient information per 100g of food which are usually available on food packaging.
High content of fruits and vegetables, fibers, and protein promote a preferable score, while high content of energy, sugar, saturated fatty acids, and sodium promote a detrimental score.