European Community Regulation no 1924/2006 and health and nutrition claims

A new European regulation, Regulation no 1924/2006 , has been issued to help protect the public from false or misleading nutritional and health claims. The regulation requires that nutrition and health claims be authorised and added to the European Community (EC) list of permitted claims. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is responsible for compiling the UK national list and is currently inviting food businesses to submit eligible claims for inclusion. This has relevance to companies producing probiotics and making health claims if they wish to continue making these claims.

The FSA website states that they will close this list on 21 September 2007.

The EC register of approved claims should be available by January 2010.

The FSA has provided a template to enable businesses to make claims and at the 13 th January, 2008 nutritional claims have been submitted for calcium, folate and iron.

The regulation will also result in the establishment of nutrient profiles for foods. Once these are established, health claims where any nutrient does not meet the criteria set by the nutrient profile for that food will not be permitted. It will be interesting to see how this works out for traditional foods high in fat for example, many cheeses, which provide major nutrients such as calcium.

Providing there is good scientific evidence it would appear to be relatively easy to make claims and businesses should benefit from reviewing the claims made to date.

Claire Towler has provided advice to companies using probiotics BB-12® and LA-5® supplied from Chr. Hansen who are considering making a nutritional or health claim through the FSA.

I will provide summary information on probiotic claims as they become available.

Probiotic and prebiotic reference list 

How to cite this article

Mullan, W.M.A. (2002) . [On-line]. Available from: http://www.dairyscience.info/probiotics/50-probiotics.html?start=14 . Accessed: 23 May, 2013. Revised 2004, December 2007, last revision February 2008, minor update December, 2008.