Food regulation and F&V promotion in Brazil

This Global F&V Newsletter features Brazil’s new dietary guideline role on promoting fruits and vegetables highlighting some key principles and perspectives adopted by the guideline to promote fruits and vegetables among other real foods. The Guideline was designed for the Brazilian population, but has achieved a global recognition as a reference of meals-based guidelines, moving recommendations from nutrients to foods and meals, and valuing the multiple dimensions of food and nutrition, beyond the biological one, encompassing the socio-cultural, economic, and environmental ones. The first paper shows how fruits and vegetables among the healthy and sustainability promoting foods benefit from the Guideline.

As the Brazilian Guideline also highlights that there are obstacles to overcome that are beyond the reach of a dietary guideline. Barriers that have been undermining the consumption of fruits and vegetables and other essential foods, by means of the unrestricted promotion of competing ultra-processed products. Hence, this issue of Global F&V Newsletter also features two papers that deal with some of these obstacles: marketing and labeling tactics used to promote ultra-processed products.

The paper on labeling indicates some of the policy-action vacuums on the regulation and also presents some opportunities to fill these gaps. Some existing and new mechanisms to regulate marketing in all its forms in Brazil, particularly when targeted at children, have been presented in the third paper. Despite these recent progresses or opportunities to improve the country’s legal framework, stronger regulations as well as mechanisms to protect public policies from opposing interests’ interferences are still required.