I should walk 500 miles (to burn off this Christmas dinner)

Confused by food nutrition labels? You’re not alone. Now, researchers have suggested an alternative: labelling the amount and type of exercise needed to burn off the calories.

Current food and drink labels display nutritional information such as the amount of calories and fat. However, researchers led by Prof Amanda Daley at Loughborough University say that these labels are having a limited effect on changing buying habits. Instead, they propose a labelling system called ‘physical activity calorie equivalent or expenditure’ (PACE), which shows how many minutes or miles of physical activity are needed to burn off the calories. For example, a small bar of milk chocolate contains 230 calories, which would take about 42 minutes of walking, or 22 minutes of running, to burn off.

They pooled the data from 14 previous studies which compared the impact of PACE labelling with that of other types of food labelling, or with no food labelling at all. They calculated that PACE labelling could cut a person’s daily calorie intake by up to 200 calories. “Public health agencies may want to consider the possibility of including policies to promote

PACE food labelling as a strategy that contributes to the prevention and treatment of obesity and related diseases,” said the researchers.

The UK’s Royal Society for Public Health has already called for PACE labelling to replace the current system. However, not everyone is convinced. A spokesperson for the eating disorder charity Beat said: “We believe that anti-obesity campaigns that focus on weight instead of health are ineffective and that recommending more exercise is a futile and over-simplistic approach to a complex problem. Most urgently, public health campaigns must consider people’s mental as well as their physical health, moving from obesityshaming to evidence-based campaigns that instil confidence and support healthy eating.”