The government’s flagship initiative to improve Australians’ diets is “working great” as a marketing tool for food manufacturers, but is not helping people make healthier choices, new research has found.
The Health Star Rating system was introduced in 2014 as a government-led front-of-pack nutrition label designed to be a simple way to compare the overall nutritional quality of products on the shelf, as recommended by the World Health Organisation.
The rating, from half to five stars, is calculated based on an algorithm that factors in seven nutrients – points are lost for energy, saturated fat, sugar and salt content but can be gained back for protein, fibre and fruit/vegetable content.
But less than four out of 10 products on supermarket shelves that should carry the Health Star Rating currently do, according to a report published Wednesday by the George Institute for Global Health, affiliated with the University of New South Wales. The ratings are intended for any product that has a nutrient panel; single ingredient products such as plain sugar are excluded.
The main shortcoming of Australia’s system is that it is voluntary, said Dr Alexandra Jones, senior author of the report, leading most manufacturers to use it selectively – putting it on products that score well and leaving it off those that don’t.
The research report found the percentage of products that displayed the health star rating dropped from 40% in 2019 to 36% in 2023, which makes it “virtually impossible” to meet the government’s target of 50% by 14 November 2023.
As a “general trend,” the report found health star rating uptake was higher in food categories such as milk-based protein drinks where products scored a higher average rating, and lower in categories with lower average ratings, such as jams, confectionery and ice creams.
Trained data collectors photographed images of every item of food on the shelves of Australia’s four major grocery retailers, Coles, Woolworths, ALDI, and Independent Grocers of Australia (IGA), between March and June 2023.
The researchers then compared which products display the health star rating and which do not, and if the rating was not displayed, the researchers generated a health star rating to see what the product would score.
The report calls on the government to make the health star rating mandatory.
Jones said, “at the moment health stars is working great as a marketing tool for the food industry, because they can use it when products score highly”. But she said consumers “can’t really use it to make the best choices because they’re missing on more than half of products”.
A department of health spokesperson said if uptake does not reach at least 70% of intended products by November 2025, “mandating the system will be considered”.
The government is expected to release its own review of the health star rating system in 2024.
For example, Jones said, Kellogg’s – despite being one of the first companies to adopt the health star rating – put it on all its breakfast cereals, where they typically score well, but does not display them on its children’s snack bars, such as LCMs, which tend to get half a star.
Guardian Australia has contacted Kellogg’s for comment.
The notable exceptions were Coles and Woolworth’s supermarket home brands, which put the health star rating on all their products, even if they only score half a star, Jones said.
At least 15 other countries have mandatory front-of-pack nutrition labels, with an especially rapid uptake of strong signage in Latin America, such as stop sign warning labels on unhealthy foods in Chile, Mexico and Peru.
Terry Slevin, the CEO of the Public Health Association of Australia, agreed the health star ratings need to be mandated and said it was “a simple right” to information all consumers should have. “If the food industry is denying people that, then the government has to regulate.”
Prof Timothy Gill, an expert in public health nutrition at the University of Sydney’s Charles Perkins Centre, said the health star rating is “only useful if it’s on all products so [that] there’s comparability”.
Associate prof Christina Pollard from the school of population health at Curtin University said she believed warning labels on unhealthy foods would be more appropriate than health stars.
Diet-related diseases including heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes and some cancers are among the leading causes of death in Australia. Gill, Slevin and Jones all said there was no single “silver bullet” preventative health measure – whether a sugar tax or food labelling – which could improve the instance of chronic disease in Australia, but that greater investment in a range of measures was necessary.
