The bold move is being pushed by EU Health Commissioner Markos Kyprianou over an alarming rise of obesity rates in the continent. According to a 2005 report by the International Obesity Task Force, seven European nations have a higher proportion of overweight adults than the United States.
These are in Finland, Germany, Greece, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Malta.
The mandatory label warning, however, must be approved by EU nations and the European Parliament. The measures excludes beer, wine and spirits. The parliament turned down suggestions to use a traffic light system that categorizes food into three color-coded health groups.
It was supposed to be patterned after the system used by Britain's Food Standards Agency which uses red, yellow and green to indicate high, medium or low fat, saturated fat, salt and sugar contents. A number of British food manufacturers have adopted the system, including Marks and Spencer and Sainsbury.
The parliament would rather leave the matter of using the traffic light system to individual EU nations.
U.K. food manufacturers, in an effort to drumbeat their production of healthier meals, boosted their advertising budgets by more than 20 percent in 2005. Food brands that had heavily invested on advertising included Danone, Kellogg's, Kraft, Twinings, Bestfoods and Cereal Partners.
