When shopping, you have to be careful not to get carried away, because not everything that is advertised as healthy is, nor, for example, foods and drinks that are advertised as belonging to the Mediterranean diet without actually being so. This has been the alert issued by a team of researchers from the Department of Communication at Pompeu Fabra University (UPF) and the Open University of Catalonia (UOC) after analyzing 1,219 Spanish food advertisements in the written press, television, radio and internet for 103 products and 541 beverage advertisements for 109 products.
The authors of the study, which has been published in the NFS Journal, have concluded that only 13.59% of the advertisements analyzed between 2011 and 2020 under the ‘Mediterranean diet’ claim actually had a high nutritional value, measured with the system of Nutriscore labeling. The remaining 86.41% corresponded to 13.59% that had a very low nutritional value and 29.13%, low; 25.27% obtained a medium nutritional value, and 19.42% had a medium-high nutritional value.
According to the research, the food products that most use the ‘Mediterranean’ advertisement are fried tomato and sauces (50%), followed by soups and pre-cooked food (45%). Regarding the case of drinks, 89% of them are alcoholic –47.71% wine, 16.57% beer and 12.84% gin–, and only 11% had no alcohol, for example, on 4 .59% were soft drinks, 3.67% were sugary juices and 2.75% were water.
“It’s actually false advertising”
“According to Spanish legislation applied to advertising, it is not strictly misleading advertising. But the advertising law dates from the eighties and has great inaccuracies, as well as being very vague in certain aspects. For this reason, although some of the components of these products are covered by the concept of the Mediterranean diet, in reality it is misleading advertising, since they only have some component that is part of the nutritional pyramid of the Mediterranean diet. If you analyze the labeling, they don’t have much of a healthy product. In other words, you don’t look at the complete product”, explains Mònika Jiménez-Morales, one of the authors of the research.
Advertising uses the term ‘Mediterranean’ as a claim to reach consumers and make them believe that the product is healthier
Everything that is advertised as healthy is more successful, however, it is not always. The fight against the obesity epidemic is promoting a diet based on the Mediterranean diet, which has been shown to be beneficial for health. However, “aware of these benefits, advertising uses it as a claim to reach consumers, but misleading language can harm the health of consumers,” says Mireia Montaña, the other author of the study.
Therefore, they ask for a more rigorous regulation of advertising and for more measures to be taken to inform the consumer about how to read nutritional labels, in this way they will be able to identify healthy products for themselves and it will be more difficult for them to Let yourself be carried away by the label ‘Mediterranean product’.
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