All parents and childminders worry about what they feed to their children, and yet it can be surprisingly difficult to get a real idea of how healthy food products are.  That's all set to change as the EU has agreed to enforce food labeling standards.  There has been demand for the EU to enforce the 'traffic light' schemes helping consumers see at a glance how foods fare, but that isn't the route they are going.  Instead the EU will require the breakdown of Calories, carbohydrates, sugars and fats.

Most foods already have these breakdowns, so what's new?

To date there hasn't been a standard in the way that labels are displayed.  This has lead to various 'tricks' used by food manufacturers to hide certain facts about their food when they aren't entirely complimentary.  For example:-

• Sugars are carbohydrates but many sugar-laden products only display a carbohydrate count, masking the sugar content.
• Many foods high in saturated fats (the more dangerous type of fat) don't display that, simply showing the amount of total fats. For some products, saturated fat can account for almost all of the fat content.
• Values are often broken down by 'portion', but a portion is often unrepresentative. For example, 500ml bottles of fizzy drinks are usually broken down and displayed as 2 portions, whereas many consumers will drink a whole bottle at once.  Some 'portions' of soft drinks can contain 30% of the adult recommended daily amount of sugar, but by consuming the whole bottle, you are consuming 60% of your recommended sugar limit.  The EU regulations will ensure values are presented in a uniform way making it easier to compare foods directly.
• High salt levels are often masked as 'Sodium' values.  For actual salt levels, multiply sodium by 2.5 and you're just about there!

The new rules will also cover ALL packaged foods so you will start to see labels on products that you haven't seen them on before, such as prepackaged fruit and meat.

The more information we are given as consumers, the more informed are our choices.  Of course we can have the odd treat, or we can choose to ignore healthy foods altogether, but at least we can make that choice. When it comes to feeding our children, we often go that little bit further, buying more organic produce or foods with established provenance.  The more we know about our food, the easier it is to feed our children the way we choose to!

The new EU regulations have been established this month and large food manufacturers have 3 years to comply, smaller food producers have 5 years to comply.  We won't see a massive change overnight, more a gentle evolution of current practices over the next few years.

We have long been warned of the environmental impact of disposable nappies - indeed the statistics are quite frightening: 8 million nappies enter landfill in the UK every day, they take up to 500 years to break down, and the quantity of raw materials and energy required to make them are staggering.  However, government research in 2008 found that the overall environmental impact of manufacturing and washing reusable cloth nappies may actually be worse than for disposable nappies.

One of the concerns of disposable nappies in landfill is for the amount of methane that they release as a result of the excrement inside.  This is a moot point as the same quantity of methane will still be released from reusable nappies, just not from a single landfill site.

There is far less energy used in the production of reusable cloth nappies when compared to the much more artificial disposable nappies, but this can easily be outweighed by the additional energy required to launder cloth nappies over their useful life cycle.  Indeed, the environmental impact of using reusable cloth nappies can be twice as damaging as disposables if certain measures aren't taken.  If you want to be a true eco-warrior then use reusable cloth nappies, but also make sure that you:-

• Wash them at a lower temperature (60 degrees is adequate rather than a 90 degree wash)
• Use an energy efficient (ideally A+ rated) washing machine
• Avoid tumble drying the nappies, line dry them whenever possible
• Use them for siblings and not just one child
• Wash them alongside other garments on fuller loads, don't just run a wash for a few nappies alone