Brazil – DICOL announces review of regulations on new ingredients, food supplements, and health claims list at its 6th meeting

The agenda for the day included the proposals for public consultation of the IN to establish specifications for the identity, purity and composition of ingredients authorized for use in food; for public consultation of the RDC to amend RDC 243/2018, which provides for health requirements for food supplements, RDC/2023, which provides for safety testing and authorization for use of novel foods and novel ingredients, and IN/2018, which provides for lists of components, limits of use, declarations and supplementary labeling of food supplements.

Article – How Brazilian Schoolchildren Identify, Classify, and Label Foods and Beverages—A Card Sorting Methodology

This study examined how Brazilian schoolchildren identified, classified, and labeled foods and beverages. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 133 schoolchildren aged 7 to 10 years old from a public school located in southern Brazil in 2015. A set of cards with pictures of 32 food and beverage items from the web-based Food Intake and Physical Activity of Schoolchildren tool (Web-CAAFE) were used. Participants identified each item, formed groups for them based on similarity, and assigned labels for those groups. Student’s t-tests and analysis of variance (ANOVA) tests were used to verify the mean difference between the groups of items. K-means cluster analysis was applied to identify similar clusters. Schoolchildren made an average of 9.1 piles of foods and beverages that they thought were similar (±2.4) with 3.0 cards (±1.8) each. Five groups were identified: meats, snacks and pasta, sweets, milk and dairy products, and fruits and vegetables. The most frequently used nomenclature for labeling groups was taxonomic-professional (47.4%), followed by the specific food item name (16.4%), do not know/not sure (13.3%), and evaluative (health perception) (8.8%). The taxonomic-professional category could be applied to promote improvements in the identification process of food and beverage items by children in self-reported computerized dietary questionnaires.