Alcohol labeling gives false impression of health, Université Laval researchers say

Nutritional information found on some alcoholic beverages leads consumers to mistakenly conclude that these products are good for their health, researchers from Université Laval have found.

In fact, the study’s author pointed out, no amount of alcohol is safe for health.

“Alcohol has really become normalized in our society, so it’s really a challenge to communicate to consumers what its effects on health are,” said Lana Vanderlee, who is a professor at the School of Nutrition at Université Laval and a researcher at the NUTRISS Centre of the Quebec institution.

In Canada, beverages with an alcohol content below 0.5 per cent must display a nutrition facts panel on their container. Beverages containing more than 0.5 per cent alcohol are exempt from this requirement, unless a nutrition claim—such as “less sugar”—appears on the label.

And when there is a chart, the regulations require that it have the same format as the one found on the food.

However, the presence of such a table on a product’s label leads three out of ten people to conclude that it is a better choice for health than a product that does not have one, Professor Vanderlee and her colleagues discovered.

Professor Vanderlee noted that there is “solid evidence” that placing warning labels on the front of alcohol bottles effectively communicates the risks associated with alcohol consumption to consumers.

“But at the same time, we’re talking about nutritional information, because many believe that consumers have the right to know what their alcoholic beverages contain,” she added. “The problem is that this nutritional information has a ‘health halo’ effect that automatically makes them appear healthy.”

We are therefore on the wrong track to assume that adding nutritional information on alcoholic beverages will allow consumers to make informed choices, added Professor Vanderlee, “since with alcohol, the risk is there regardless of the nutritional value.”

“Giving these products a healthy appearance is really not the result we are looking for,” she said.

She and her team conducted an online survey of just under 4,000 people. The researchers presented participants with four labels designed to be affixed to the back of a wine bottle.

The first label contained no nutritional information, while the second featured a standard nutrition facts table. Labels 3 and 4 presented essentially the same information (calories, sugar), but one in text form and the other in a table whose title made no reference to nutrition.

Almost a third of the participants who saw the second label subsequently felt that drinking that wine would be healthy. One in five participants gave the same answer for labels 1 and 4, and one in four for label 3.

In other words, a label displaying a nutrition information table of the same type as that of the food was more likely to lead consumers to conclude that the product could be good for their health.

Nutritional information creates the false impression that these products can be good for your health, Professor Vanderlee denounced, “which is not the case.” She reiterated that alcohol is “a major cause of death and disease, including seven types of cancer, and there is no safe minimum consumption level.”

“Alcoholic beverages are found in our grocery stores, often on the same shelves as sugary drinks or energy drinks,” she concluded. “But with alcohol, we’re talking about a substance (that can be addictive), psychoactive, and (that is associated) with cancer.”

The findings of this study were published in the journal Preventive Medicine.

–This report by La Presse Canadienne was translated by CityNews