Word: parliament
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...cookies is high in sugar, for instance, it'll get a red light. Food and drink companies oppose this approach and prefer to maintain the status quo - requiring only the calorie content to be displayed on the package front, with nutritional information listed on the back. The European Parliament is expected to vote on the issue in May or June. (See pictures of what the world eats...
...Linda McAvan, a member of the European Parliament from Britain's Labour Party and a supporter of the color-coded food labels, echoes that sentiment. "There is evidence that consumer pressure generated through the traffic-light scheme can lead to product reformulation by retailers," she says. "One major retailer told me how their least healthy sandwich range was phased out when labeling was introduced, as people stopped buying the high-fat and -salt options." (See "Cutting Salt Can Have Big Health Benefits...
...powerful food and drink lobbies and their allies in the European Parliament aren't quite so sure. Renate Sommer, a parliamentarian from Germany's Christian Democratic Union party, favors limiting front-of-package labeling to calorie content and allowing food companies to decide how much nutritional information to list on the back. "It would be wrong to overload consumers. Otherwise you would need a calculator to work out your diet," she says. "The more you label, the less people read. The U.S. has more and more food labeling, but obesity rates keep rising. We should learn from their mistakes...
...Traffic-light opponents may have gotten the upper hand on May 16 when a European Parliament committee recommended backing the simpler front-of-package labels that list only calorie counts. But with a couple of months to go in the debate, health activists say there's a chance the multicolored labels could still get the green light...
...nationalistic laws go, the one just passed in Slovakia seems rather tame on the surface. Earlier this month, the Slovak parliament approved a "patriotic act" mandating that every school play the Slovak national anthem on Mondays and that each classroom display a set of state symbols: the flag, the coat of arms, the lyrics to the anthem and the constitution's preamble. However innocuous this all may appear to be, though, Slovaks are outraged that the government is forcing them, by law, to be more patriotic...