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Top1. Introduction
Dietary patterns reflect changes in the environment, and also in preferences of consumers, which make unhealthy diet one of the main health risk factors (Pichierri et al., 2021). The rate of overweight and obesity in the world increases due to consumption of products rich in energy, fat, added sugars, and salts (Da Silva et al., 2022; McCrickerd et al., 2020). For this reason, governments apply strategies to improve the health of the population based on a healthy diet (Arroyo et al., 2021; Pujara et al., 2022; Signal et al., 2022). Since global problems require global responses, healthy eating is one of the objectives of the Agenda 2030. The SDG 2 of this Agenda aims to improve eating habits through a better access to healthy and nutritious food as a formula for health improvement (Iazzi et al., 2022). A healthy diet and habits are a determining factor in the prevention of obesity and its related non-communicable diseases (de-Magritis et al., 2017; Goiana-da-Silva et al., 2019). However, only a minority of the population shows interest in information related to the food they consume (Arenas-Gaitán et al., 2022; Signal et al., 2022; Van der Merwe et al., 2022), so that changing inappropriate health habits requires recognizing that the behaviour of citizens is not rational (Arroyo et al., 2021; Pujara et al., 2022).
Since the shopping environment exposes the consumer to promotional communications that do not necessarily seek to encourage the consumer to opt for healthier products (Van der Merwe et al., 2022), the provision of information is one of the main strategies to enable consumers to make informed decisions about the quality of food and to improve eating habits (Lee & Sozen, 2020). This is essential to reduce malnutrition (de-Magritis et al., 2017) providing more benefit than the need of medical care (Goiana-da-Silva et al., 2019). However, although food labels are essential to avoid unhealthy diets (Cecchini & Warin, 2016), consumers trust promotional communications more than their knowledge when consulting food labels (Van der Merwe et al., 2022).
Any case, labelling is an effective way to provide information to consumers about the food content and promote healthier food choices (Da Silva et al., 2022; Kumar & Kapoor, 2017; Sarda et al., 2020; Thaivalappil et al., 2019). For this reason, many countries use nutritional labelling, a type of behavioural intervention closes to nudges and far from coercion and prohibitions (Awasthi, 2021; Salnikova & Stantan, 2021). While back-of-pack nutrition labelling is a widely accepted strategy, the relevance of the labelling leads the European Union to focus on the use of simplified front-of-pack (FOP) information on the nutritional properties of food (Da Silva et al., 2022; Sarda et al., 2020). In Spain, the nutrition information on the labels of packaged foods is compulsory since 2016, according to the Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 October 2011. Recently, the complement of the Nutri-Score summary indicator FOP labelling has been voluntarily established. Nutri-Score provides consumers with an easily understandable nutritional information summary of the products to guide consumers to healthier food choices, and serves as a discriminating criterion to encourage manufacturers to reformulate and improve the nutritional quality of their products (Sarda et al., 2020).