ECONOMYAND ENVIRONMENT (A DREWNOWSKI, SECTION EDITOR) Nutrition Labeling to Prevent Obesity: Reviewing the Evidence from Europe

# The Author(s) 2012. This article is published with open access at Springerlink.com Abstract Overweight and obesity are major public health problems in the European Union (EU). Providing nutrition information on foods and menus is considered a relevant means to guide consumers toward more healthful food choices, in part characterized by adequate energy intakes to achieve and maintain a healthy body weight. Various formats of back-of-pack and front-of-pack nutrition labeling can cur-rently be found across the EU, with varying levels of penetra-tion. Experimental studies show that consumers are reasonably able to understand and use the different systems to identify more healthful food products from given choice sets. However, European studies assessing the impact of nu-trition labeling on actual dietary intake are scarce, and no real-life evidence exists linking nutrition label use with measured changes in body weight. This review summarizes how Euro-pean consumers respond to nutrition labels when shopping for food or eating out of home, considering evidence published between 2007 and mid-March 2012