How Food Transparency Helps Fight Obesity

A complex problem

Remember that obesity is a complex problem, it comes from diet, lifestyle, but not only, many factors are involved ranging from physiognomy, heredity to psychology or culture.

It is very important to have a patient and constructive approach which in no way discriminates against or stigmatizes people. On the contrary, we must feel solidarity in order to make everyone’s life easier and more integrated, while allowing everyone to take care of their well-being.

How Food Transparency Can Help Prevent Obesity

With the global obesity epidemic steadily increasing over the past 50 years, it is important to continue to seek solutions on all aspects, and in particular on the quality of our food.

1. Transparency informs consumer choices

Open Food Facts believes in pedagogy and education as a determining factor. We also believe that food transparency is necessary to enable informed choices. It is for this reason that Open Food Facts pioneered the Nutri-Score and the Nova indicator on food additives.

2. Transparency encourages and facilitates improvements in product quality

We believe in a virtuous circle: if consumers make better choices, producers naturally improve the nutritional quality of their products to match these changes, thus leading to a overall improvement in supply.

Thanks to our platform for producers, we also indicate, free of charge, to all manufacturers who send us their product data, ways of improving the nutritional quality of their products, to encourage and facilitate the overall improvement of the offer.

3. Transparency accelerates scientific research

The Open Food Facts database is also a tool by citizens for the world of research, such as EREN , which seeks to understand on a large scale the causes of the rise of obesity, its consequences and possible remedies.

A personal and collective mobilization

Food is not the only center of attention, lifestyle is also an important factor, as recalled by the  french campaign “manger bouger” (eating and moving), which also offers many tools to help citizens.

We need your help to make the Open Food Facts database ever more useful for this purpose: either by installing our application to complete the product sheets, by joining us to improve the quality of the data or to convince more producers to join our transparency program, or of course by a simple donation .