NDC Dairy: Food for Life Conference - Clarion Hotel, Dublin - 23 June 2009
World Consumer Issues Regarding Dairy
Kevin Bellamy, Executive Director, Global Dairy Platform
Most consumers wish to eat a healthy balanced diet, which is satisfying and pleasurable to consume and meets all of their nutrition requirements, without the need for detailed planning or recording while leading otherwise busy lives.
The advice to consumers is often over simplified or contradictory. For instance, there are too many isolated studies published with findings which are easy to take out of context and outputs from trials are mostly highly specific and difficult to draw generalizations from.
As a means of combating the increasing confusion in nutrition communication, governments are increasing exercising regulatory controls. The simplified regulatory and advisory messages too frequently come over as authoritarian. DON’T EAT SODIUM!, DON’T EAT TRANSFAT!, DON’T EAT SATURATED FATS!.
Consumers are “confused” and fed up with being told “what not to eat”
We eat foods not nutrients. What we need is something to help people work out what to eat more of and what to eat less of, without being lectured to, helping them feel in control of their diet.
There are a lot of positives from dairy! Each nutrient with a specific benefit with a complex scientific explanation. That often makes connecting with consumers in order to explain the role of dairy in the diet. a difficult job. The challenge is to translate an ever increasing body of science into clear compelling messages.
Too often you hear the comment that ……..“my teenage daughter has given up milk because of concerns about her weight”. This is not only bad from the point of view of her bones - but her concern about eating for a healthy weight simply by “cutting out” foods is, frankly, not a great approach.
Weight Management is a major concern for many people and is simply a matter of calories. People around the world are consuming too many calories and burning too few calories.
Of course consuming fewer calories is only good if you continue to supply the nutrients your body needs. So the trick is to move from foods which have “more calories and less nutrients” to “foods that are less calories but supply more nutrients”. Or, if you like, move from “Energy Dense” foods to “Nutrient Dense Foods”. That’s where consuming dairy foods scores big time. Dairy is packed with nutrients for relatively few calories.
Talking about nutrient density offers a real benefit as a simple and compelling argument for consuming dairy products, which generally provide “more nutrients for less energy”.
The real issue is to develop a different way of helping consumers eat a ‘healthy diet’.
By healthy we mean ‘free from disease’ and the diseases caused by diet are often those caused by either a lack of particular nutrients, or due to one of the diseases associated with obesity eg type 2 diabetes or hypertension (collectively known as metabolic syndrome).
Last year we evaluated the effect of increasing the American intake of dairy products, just to government recommended levels. The report concluded that such a move would save the US over $90Bn per year in direct and in-direct health costs. There is real value to the consumer and society in consuming a healthy diet.
In an ageing and more overweight population high blood pressure is becoming a major issue for consumers. In fact around the WHO estimates that about 1 in 3 of us has high blood pressure and that hypertension causes about ½ of all strokes and 1/3 of all heart attacks. For those people starting with high systolic blood pressure – consuming a diet high in fruit and veg will reduce the pressure – but adding low fat dairy to the mix makes the diet much more effective
The DASH diet has been around for a while – but the work clearly shows that increasing the amount of fruit and veg in diet helps to reduce blood pressure while adding dairy shows an even greater benefit similar to that achieved with pharmaceuticals at a lower cost.
Take another example of dairy contributing to health. The Cardia Study published in 2002.
This is a group of 5115 black and white men and women aged 18-30 years at their initial examination in 1985-1986. Since then they have recorded life styles and diet patterns and been re-examined at intervals.
Amongst the group – some of the group became obese some didn’t. The obese group suffered from the issues associated with metabolic syndrome – but in the case of each condition – there was less occurrence in the individuals consuming more dairy.
So if dairy and the nutrients it provides has such an important role in staying healthy. What is needed is advice that connects with the consumers, showing the benefits of a balanced diet including dairy products in a simple fashion. We need to offer consumers a new and simple way of thinking about how to eat healthily, without having to become an expert. Luckily such a system already exists.
The organisations from all 5 major food groups in America have been working together to construct a way of communicating about the nutrient density of foods, helping people to choose foods with nutrients which they need, they call it the Nutrient Rich Index. The result has been validated against health records and databases to scientifically prove that eating healthily leads to better health.
The system identifies dairy products form an important part of supplying key nutrients, but has so far been validated against only American Health outcomes. Now we are staring to validate the model against records in other countries and hope soon to be able to launch the system around the globe.