12
Food and Nutrition: Policy and
Regulatory Issues
Michael J Gibney and Aideen McKevitt
Key messages- The human food supply is highly regulated and while in the past
there was an emphasis on food safety, there is now a rapidly
expanding regulatory base covering nutrition. - Any policy decision in the nutrition regulatory framework needs
to be informed by up-to-date and relevant data on prevailing
food and nutrient intake patterns. These metrics are compared
with agreed standards for optimal food and nutrient intake and
on the basis of any discrepancy, public health nutrition programs
encompassing regulatory issues are initiated. - Public health nutrition programs can be supply driven or demand
driven. In the supply-driven option, the government takes the
decision centrally to alter some properties of foods the most
common approach being mandatory food fortifi cation. In
© 2009 MJ Gibney and A McKevitt.
demand-driven approaches, efforts are made to create a demand
for a new food-purchasing pattern through a nutrition communi-
cation process.- A nutrition communication process should always be built on
actual studies of consumers attitudes and beliefs, and a number
of tools are commonly used to communicate nutrition and health
messages including nutritional labeling and nutrition claims. - Globalization of the food supply has been accompanied by evolv-
ing governance issues that have produced a regulatory environ-
ment at national and global level led by large national,
international agencies in order to facilitate trade and to establish
and retain the confi dence of consumers in the food supply
chain.
12.1 Introduction
Few areas of our lives are more regulated than that of
the food supply and within that regulatory frame-
work, three distinct divisions are evident: food chemi-
cals, food microbial hazards, and nutrition. In the
past, the chemistry and microbiology aspects of food
regulation tended to dominate but in recent times,
the regulatory environment for nutrition has begun
to receive increasing attention given that (a) the role
of diet in noncommunicable chronic disease has been
so extensively accepted and woven into policy and (b)
food producers have made efforts to develop innova-
tive products to help reduce the burden of disease
risk. The present chapter is intended to provide new
students of nutrition with a brief insight into the
present direction of food regulation as it relates to
dietary choices.
12.2 Reference points in human nutrition
Chapter 10 in this textbook outlines the many options
that are available for measuring food intake and con-
verting those data into nutrient intakes. Such data are
fundamental to the development of nutrition-related
regulatory policy. The more detailed the level at which
data are collected, the more useful they are for advis-
ing and informing policy. Prevailing dietary habits, as
measured through dietary surveys, represent the fi rst
reference point for nutrition policy. The second set of
reference points are those targets set out by expert
committees that will move populations toward ever-
healthier diets. Chapter 7 of this textbook describes
the basic principles involved in setting out target
values for the assessment of dietary intakes, primarily
for micronutrients. These are defi ned using variable
terms across the globe but, generally, all defi nitions