Who is Looking for Nutritional Food Labels?

Obesity amongst the population in Europe is increasing at an alarming rate. Consequently, nutritional and lifestyle factors are implicated in the huge increase in several chronic diseases in Europe. The Southern Europeans tend to be amongst the worst, with Greece being first in adult obesity mainly due to the replacement of the Mediterranean diet with ready-made and fast foods. People want to see change towards an environment that makes it easier to make healthy choices. The EU, in order to assist consumers make healthy food choices, tried to make nutritional information available to consumers through a food labelling law framework, which currently works on a voluntary basis with the perspective to change towards a mandatory system. We conducted a study in Greece in order to assess consumer use of nutritional food labels and determine which consumers use certain types of nutrient content information. We found that almost a third of consumers often use food labels and these are the more educated, who are more nutritionally knowledgeable. Many others do not, and to increase their chances of reading the labels one should improve their knowledge of nutrition having in mind that they are not big users of the media but get their information from informal sources.