AGRI-FOOD: BALDRIGHI (ORIGIN ITALIA), “NUTRISCORE” ADVANTAGES ONLY THE GREAT NORTHERN EUROPEAN INDUSTRIES, GOOD MINISTER BELLANOVA WITH “BATTERY SCHEME” THAT OVERCOMES AND IMPROVES THE TRAFFIC LIGHT TO PROTECT THE HEALTH OF EU CONSUMERS.

I believe that this simplistic way of classifying foods is a nutritional mistake, because it will end up selecting foods heavily; it will lead citizens and consumers to an increasingly less varied diet, because it would eliminate from our shopping cart a series of foods that are essential for our health. This would cause a very serious damage to the health of all European citizens, instead of benefiting all consumers >>. << The discussion is still in full swing, because opinions are conflicting even in the medical-scientific field. In all the states of the European community there is a very confused climate, but constructive reliefs are emerging. But it is evident that there are some countries that really have a diet made up of very few products, with Martian eating habits; perhaps they believed in this way to correct their internal situation - continues Cesare Baldrighi, President of ORIGIN ITALIA, the association that brings together all the main Italian PDO and PGI agri-food consortia - Instead, countries like Italy, the place where the Mediterranean Diet was born made of foods strongly linked to tradition and production disciplinary expressions also of the local culture, they have great difficulty in modifying their diet, because it is already varied and healthy, so much so that it is copied all over the world. On the other hand, multinational industries in the agri-food sector, mainly in Northern Europe, which manufacture their products according to market demand and modify their products as they wish, would not be particularly affected by the "Nutriscore Traffic Light", but rather would benefit from it because they could be explicit in label, however, without going into detail. In fact now industrial agri-food products have packages almost entirely occupied by the list of ingredients, for the most part of industrial origin; with the "Nutriscore Traffic Light" their labels should no longer have specific details and it would no longer be possible to understand what these products really contain >>. << Our Minister of Agriculture Teresa Bellanova - continues Cesare Baldrighi, President of ORIGIN ITALIA - is very active on this front, and is moving in a very correct and rational way by contacting other members of the European Community. We at ORIGIN ITALIA confirm our aversion to the "Nutriscore Semaphore", but at the same time we support Minister Bellanova's proposal for an alternative that improves it: it is a "Battery Scheme", that is a system that also takes into account the quantities of the various ingredients, and not just the red-yellow-green traffic light relating to fats alone. At the European level, I hope that many other EU countries will be in favor of our proposal for the "Battery Scheme", which overcomes and improves the Nutriscore, with a view to protecting the health of all EU consumers >>, concluded Cesare Baldrighi, President of ORIGIN ITALIA, the association that brings together all the main Italian PDO and IGP agri-food consortia, as well as past president of the GRANA PADANO PDO CONSORTIUM.