Somewhere in the Great Britain nutrition and health claims (NHC) register, a document with all the narrative verve its title promises, it is written that a retailer may tell shoppers that “barley grain fibre contributes to an increase in faecal bulk”.
What that retailer may not do is print “fibre supports gut health” on the same packet. The first phrase is legally approved and commercially useless. The second is how actual human beings talk about food, and it is forbidden.
This is the absurdity M&S has decided to take on. Food managing director Alex Freudmann has written to Yvette Cooper, the health secretary, alongside nutritionist Emily English and Bowel Cancer UK ambassador Dr Anisha Patel, calling for a review of the rules governing fibre claims. The letter, dated 6 August, is courteously drafted, but the message underneath is blunt: customers want to eat more fibre, retailers want to help them do it and the law requires both parties to converse through the medium of a gastroenterology textbook.
The numbers make the case for them. According to the National Diet and Nutrition Survey, 96% of UK adults consume less than the recommended 30g of fibre a day. M&S’s own research found 92% of its customers want to eat more of the stuff. In modern Britain, that is about as close to unanimity as it gets. All that stands between good intentions and better baskets is a vocabulary problem, and it is one entirely of the rulebook’s making.
How did we end up here? The regime descends from the EU’s 2006 nutrition and health claims regulation, carried over into UK law when Britain left the EU, under which every permitted claim was scientifically assessed and its wording fixed in a register. Businesses must stay close to the authorised text. The science behind the assessments was rigorous. The prose, evidently, was never shown to anyone who had met a shopper.
The register’s back catalogue rewards study. The European Food Safety Authority once rejected a claim that regular water consumption reduces the risk of dehydration, a ruling so baffling it became a minor diplomatic incident. The same panel were initially unpersuaded that prunes supported normal bowel function, a conclusion that will surprise anyone who has eaten more than four of them. And when the system does say yes, the language arrives pre-ruined: the newest approved claim, granted to kiwifruit last year, permits the phrase “contributes to normal bowel function by increasing stool frequency”. One can only imagine the packaging mock-ups.
This is not just a food problem
It would be comforting to believe this is purely a food problem. It is not. It is a national habit. Pension providers must send savers so-called wake-up packs before retirement; a former pensions minister told MPs they ran to 40 pages or more and were “guaranteed to send you to sleep”. Medicine leaflets bury the one instruction that matters beneath a comprehensive census of every side effect recorded since 1962, printed at a size that assumes the patient owns laboratory equipment. Financial services key information documents achieve the impressive feat of being simultaneously mandatory and unread. Across regulated Britain the same pattern repeats: precision is compulsory, comprehension is optional, and documents designed to inform consumers succeed mainly in informing the lawyers who drafted them.
The standard defence is that strict wording protects the public from snake oil – and the defence is not wrong. Nobody wants a return to yoghurts promising eternal life or breakfast cereals curing melancholy. The claims register exists because food marketing, left unsupervised, has historically behaved like a Victorian tonic salesman. But there is a difference between banning false claims and mandating unintelligible ones.
“Fibre supports gut health” is true, evidenced and instantly understood. Forcing retailers to say it in Latin-adjacent committee prose does not add rigour. It subtracts readers. A claim nobody understands protects nobody.
There is a deeper cost too. When official language and everyday language drift this far apart, people stop trusting the official version altogether and get their nutrition advice from whichever influencer shouts loudest. The gap between what institutions say and what the public actually believes is where misinformation moves in and gets comfortable. Regulators who insist on speaking in code should not be astonished when audiences find more fluent, less scrupulous narrators.
The fix is neither radical nor expensive. Since leaving the EU, Britain has run its own claims register and its own advisory committees, so the wording is no longer fixed in Brussels but is ours to change, whatever view one takes of the departure itself. The UK Nutrition and Health Claims Committee and the Scientific Advisory Committee on Nutrition could review the permitted fibre wording, test plain alternatives against the evidence, and approve the ones that hold up. Same science, fewer syllables. That is not a point about Brexit; it is a point about speaking plainly, in the clear, everyday language we all understand, and it sits entirely within the government’s gift.
M&S deserves support, and not only from its competitors’ corporate affairs teams quietly cheering from the wings. The nation’s fibre intake, unlike its labelling rules, will not shift on its own.
Mike Coppen-Gardner is the founder and CEO of WeAreSPQR
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