While from 2014 this NPR (US centric) article is easy reading while citing real information. NPR is respected for highly factual reporting.
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There has been much media coverage of those industries which disagree with the health star rating. A good example is the olive oil industry which thinks that it’s oil is better than other vegetable oils and therefore they should have a higher health rating. A higher health rating even though the calorie/kilojoule content of olive oil and other vegetable oils are similar. The purpose of health rating is not to nit-pick between differing products whether there are perceived health benefits, but to provide high level and simplistic information to a consumer about the overall salt (sodium), sugar, fat/oil, fibre and calorie/kilojoule levels of the food/drink in question.
It is worth reading the information on the Health Star website, rather than relying on what the vested interest groups say about the system and its deficiencies for the products they sell/market…
Those with vested interests and possibly don’t support the health star system are very good at presenting persuading arguments on its deficiencies…but fail to communicate the real purpose of the system.
It isn’t perfect by any means and may not be the best system, but this is the system which has been adopted for Australia.
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To mark_m:
My apologies for responding to syncretic first – and then going out to another appointment – it was just that I clicked on the link in the email alert and it gave me a page where it seemed only syncretic had responded to my original post, and by the time I had replied to him and realised there were earlier responses, with yours leading the pack, I just had time to edit my response to address it to syncretic and dash out to my appointment.
Anyway, I am back in front of my computer now and settling in for what could be a bit of a marathon! 
I love your suggestion for freezing oranges – I have decades of experience using a Champion Juicer in nut-butter mode to turn frozen bananas into 100%-banana icecream, not to mention turning a range of other frozen fruit from my various gardens (and the family macadamia farm) into sorbets, but I must confess to never having thought I could do it with citrus.
I was aware of the three-year-old existing topic, but since there didn’t seem to be a recent post, and certainly nothing about this latest media sensation, I thought I should start afresh (if you’ll pardon the pun).
If you think orange growers will not be complaining, you haven’t been following any of the media. Even the ABC, which rarely questions this kind of bureaucratic idiocy (being run by bureaucratic idiots itself), ran an interview with an orange grower pointing out how much he depends on juice factories – at least the ones that haven’t gone out of business for lack of profit – to sell the significant proportion of his crop the greengrocers don’t want.
I’m sure the idiot bureaucrats think no-one should be drinking more than 80ml of orange juice a day (although I get a lot more than that out of any single orange I buy in the supermarket, let alone out of the oranges I used to grow myself when I grew food for a living back in the last millennium) – it would be nice (and just as effective in changing consumer habits) if they thought no-one should be drinking more than 100ml of Diet Coke a day.
You’re wrong about orange juice – even the “pulp-free” kind – having no fibre, although you are right that most of the fibre you would get from eating an orange is lost in juicing, and even more in the coarse filters used to produce “pulp-free” juice, but the beauty of soluble fibre, the kind you get in fruit, is that it is, well, soluble. I’m pretty sure this shows up in Crude Analysis, but if it doesn’t, so much the worse for Crude Analysis (as if there isn’t already enough reason not to base public policy on it).
But this is not about whether orange juice is as healthy as a whole orange, it’s about whether orange juice is less healthy than Diet Coke.
Please tell my why this is so, you have said similar things before but I still don’t know why. How about a compare and contrast, the good and bad points of both.
You say this is all up to idiot bureaucrats, I suggest they may be writing the rules and the politicians supporting them based of the opinion of experts in the field. Those are the voices that should be heard more than the lobby group for one kind of drink or another.
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Reply to phb:
My apologies for responding to syncretic first – and then going out to another appointment – it was just that I clicked on the link in the email alert and it gave me a page where it seemed only syncretic had responded to my original post, and by the time I had replied to him and realised there were earlier responses, and more-thoughtful ones like yours, I just had time to edit my response to address it to syncretic and dash out to my appointment.
Anyway, I’m back in front of my computer now, and having written an epic in response to mark_m a little earlier this evening, I’ll try and be less verbose with you.
I appreciate that you anticipated (with help from your appreciation of the Chilean system) what to anyone who isn’t an idiot bureaucrat would be the obvious (mis)understanding of the health star rating system – it simply doesn’t matter what the idiot bureaucrats intend the system to mean, it will mean what the average consumer takes it to mean, and every single consumer I have spoken to about it takes it to be a measure of healthiness, not a warning that some of its ingredients may have health impacts if eaten in excess.
And if someone like me, the son of a delegate to the old Federated Council of Australian Consumer Organisations, and someone who has read almost every edition of Choice Magazine ever published, reads it as a way to compare how healthy alternative drinks may be, what hope does the vast majority of Australian shoppers have?
We are going to have to agree to disagree on how unhealthy Diet Coke may be, but the idea that it can possibly be healthier than pure fresh orange juice in the quantities normally consumed is patently absurd, except perhaps to an idiot bureaucrat who still thinks margarine is healthier than butter and that no-one should be eating muesli for breakfast.
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Reply to mark_m’s reply to my reply to syncretic:
I apologise for my so-called sense of humour leading you to believe I thought oranges would soon appear in shops sporting star-rating stickers, perhaps combined with the stickers some of them currently carry for the sake of supermarkets whose staff can’t tell the difference between an orange and a grapefruit.
I was – ineffectively – trying to make a light-hearted point about the chronic stupidity of a system that rates Diet Coke as more healthy than pure fresh fruit juice by extending the Crude Analysis approach to actual oranges.
I’m pleased to see that Choice is providing a home for the people it used to employ, the ones who thought no-one should be eating muesli for breakfast and that everyone should be using margarine instead of butter.
Reply to syncretic’s reply to my reply to his reply:
This reminds me of one of those vox pops the ABC did with schoolchildren, where only a tiny minority were able to say that oranges came from trees.
Mind you, having grown up in Canberra, and lived here for all bar 20 years of my long-ish life, I have seen a great deal of the idiot bureaucracy, not to mention having chatted with Sir Lenox Hewitt about its myriad failings.
Having spent 10 years full-time at the ANU (and somewhat more in visits to “events”) I have seen a great deal of those so-called experts, to whose voices the bureaucrats look only to reinforce the decisions they have already reached for classic avoidance-of-responsibility APS reasons. I would say that the ABC does the same to reinforce its left-wing agenda, but one of the Choice Community moderators had words with me on a previous occasion about political references, so I won’t say that.
And having spent a significant chunk of my working life in that 20 years I was away from Canberra growing food for a living, I have considerable sympathy for the hapless fruit-growers, especially for the number that will be bankrupted by this idiotic decision. I walked away from farming with nothing to show for it, having finally been beaten by all those bureaucrats with their BAs in Political Economy who were paid with my taxes to do their level best to send me broke.
As ancient as I am, I still remember some of the good things you get in orange juice (and as a point of contrast, there is nothing good in Diet Coke), although I can’t remember why fructose is healthier than sucrose, nor can I remember the other macronutrients apart from soluble fibre. As for micronutrients, the orange colour comes from caretonoids, precursors of vitamin A. There is also natural vitamin C; hesperidin, rutin, and the rest of the bioflavonoid complex; a number of the B group vitamins; various minerals; a range of antioxidants including the citric acid that acts as a natural preservative; and heaps of other goodies I can’t recall this late at night.
Although I do recall one other key ingredient: pectin. I forget why it’s generally good for you, but what called it to mind was thinking about breakfast tomorrow morning, and spreading my home-made marmalade on my buttered toast. Without pectin present, oranges could not be turned into marmalade by the addition of sugar and heat, which seems somehow apposite to this marathon discussion.
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Why is it that this is relevant? You are just repeating the naturalistic fallacy worded differently.
You still hint artificial sweetener is bad but cannot give a reason.
I think we see where your disdain for experts comes from. Do you really think the bureaucrats have it in for the orange grower?
Excess sugar, including sugar-sweetened soft-drinks, is one of the key points of the health star rating - apparently not worth a mention to you. Note this applies to other drinks aside from juice.
The point about excess sugar and fat (and just excess food) is that we are a nation getting fat. This leads to a many serious morbidities, including:
- High blood pressure
- High LDL cholesterol, low HDL cholesterol, or high levels of triglycerides
- Type 2 diabetes
- Coronary heart disease
- Stroke
- Gallbladder disease
- Osteoarthritis
The incidence of type 2 diabetes is on the gallop where being overweight and consumption of excess sugar are both powerful causes and control of sugar consumption is a key management. Consumption of excess sugar is not a trivial problem that will just go away.
Here is the Australian Medical Association on this topic:
- Continued uptake of the Health Star Rating (HSR) system on packaged foods and beverages must be evident. If this does not occur, the system will need to be mandated.
- The food industry must act in a socially responsible manner in food promotion and marketing, including realistic portion sizes and reductions in unnecessary sugars, salt and fats from processed foods.
Sugary beverages provide individuals with large quantities of sugar and provide little or no satiety. Australians consume large quantities of soft drinks.Large container sizes of soft drinks are significantly cheaper than single serving sizes, which also contributes to overconsumption. Flavoured waters, sports drinks and fruit juices also contain significant quantities of added sugars.
But the fruit growers’ lobby wants us to ignore the AMA on this.
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Of course, I don’t believe the naturalistic fallacy is a fallacy, although I have long forgotten the volumes of material I might have drawn on in my days in the 1970s doing a spot on Radio 2XX called Food for Thought to support my position. But our argument is not about whether natural is better than synthetic, it’s about whether something natural which also happens to be full of goodness can be worse for your health than something synthetic which is empty of anything good for you.
Again, while it is true that I believe artificial sweeteners are bad for you, and again I can’t remember the many volumes of material I would once have drawn on to support that position, that is not the issue. Let us assume artificial sweeteners (and the rest of the chemicals used to flavour the water in Diet Coke) are benign, they are still not actively good for you in the way all those orange-juice ingredients I managed to dredge from my ancient memory are, so at least a compare-and-contrast of what’s good for you (as you requested) comes out in favour of the juice.
My disdain is not for experts but for those blinded by their expertise, and for non-experts who wield others’ expertise as a bludgeon to beat down anyone who dares to disagree with them. The history of science is littered with certainties later proven false – I wrote a school science paper in 1971 about the greenhouse effect which my teacher gave a failing mark because the expertise at the time was that the planet was cooling – and the best scientists (in my experience) are those who maintain a vigourous scepticism about their own subject.
I know some bureaucrats do have it in for farmers, because I have managed to have conversations with them where they did not know I used to be a farmer and assumed from my decades of involvement with the ANU Food Co-op that I shared a certain political ideology with them. To tell you about those conversations would involve references to that political ideology and I understand such references are verboten on these boards.
The bureaucrats I battled during my time as a farmer were not so open in their prejudices, they just thought their BAs in Wimmins Studies (and that was just the blokes) meant they knew more than people who had been farming the land for generations about how to grow food. When the “expert” ideas they used the brute force of the state to impose on the farmer sent the farmer broke, did they so much as apologise while they continued to get promoted to ever-higher levels of publicly-funded counterproductivity, or pull a few bills from their fat wallet for the former farmer now on the dole queue? No such luck.
My point was not that idiot bureaucrats are necessarily malicious, or even unsympathetic (although many are). It was that their idiot ideas are going to send orange growers broke. I’m guessing you’ve never worked the kind of job where you work every hour humanly possible to build up an enterprise that leaves you with less than the minimum wage for each hour worked and under the constant threat of the banks selling you up and throwing you out on the street with just the shirt on your back, only to find the millions of dollars in taxes your enterprise is generating are being spent to hire public servants whose impact, regardless of motive, is to make it ever tougher for you to make a quid.
You’re right that I failed to mention “excess sugar” in my reply, but it was front and centre in my original post as the only vaguely-intellectually-defensible peg on which to hang this ludicrous decision. It beggars belief that anyone with more than two working brain cells could think that pure fresh orange juice is the same as “sugar-sweetened soft-drinks”, and I’m sure that this is not the AMA’s position. Note that in the last line you quote, the AMA is referring to fruit juice which “contains significant quantities of added sugars” – this is not the pure fresh unsweetened orange juice the bureaucrats allotting the stars believe to be less healthy than Diet Coke.
Even those fruit juices which “contain significant quantities of added sugars” are clearly not viewed by the AMA as remotely in the same class as soft drinks, not least because they do provide satiety and are not consumed in large container sizes.
I don’t know what the fruit growers’ lobby wants us to ignore, but I certainly know the idiot bureaucrats want us to ignore reality.
This topic was automatically opened after 5 days.
New food database to help consumers understand nutritional value of food they eat.
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On 17 July 2020, the Forum considered advice from FRSC, finalised a response to all outstanding decision points, and endorsed the Review Implementation Plan and an implementation start date of 15 November 2020.
The HSR System Five Year Review – Implementation Work Plan is now live on the HSR website on the Review Webpage.
It continues to be voluntary which is a shame. Worse in my opinion is that control, management, evaluation, and governance has been moved to Food Standards ANZ; a body that doesn’t seem to make decisions that the food industry oppose.
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