Perspective: A Definition for Whole-Grain Food Products-Recommendations from the Healthgrain Forum
Journal article, 2017

Whole grains are a key component of a healthy diet, and enabling consumers to easily choose foods with a high whole-grain content is an important step for better prevention of chronic disease. Several definitions exist for whole-grain foods, yet these do not account for the diversity of food products that contain cereals. With the goal of creating a relatively simple whole-grain food definition that aligns with whole-grain intake recommendations and can be applied across all product categories, the Healthgrain Forum, a not-for-profit consortium of academics and industry working with cereal foods, established a working group to gather input from academics and industry to develop guidance on labeling the whole-grain content of foods. The Healthgrain Forum recommends that a food may be labeled as "whole grain" if it contains ≥30% whole-grain ingredients in the overall product and contains more whole grain than refined grain ingredients, both on a dry-weight basis. For the purposes of calculation, added bran and germ are not considered refined-grain ingredients. Additional recommendations are also made on labeling whole-grain content in mixed-cereal foods, such as pizza and ready meals, and a need to meet healthy nutrition criteria. This definition allows easy comparison across product categories because it is based on dry weight and strongly encourages a move from generic whole-grain labels to reporting the actual percentage of whole grain in a product. Although this definition is for guidance only, we hope that it will encourage more countries to adopt regulation around the labeling of whole grains and stimulate greater awareness and consumption of whole grains in the general population.

dietary guidelines

food guidelines

food labelling

food regulation

dietary intake

whole grains

public policy

cereal

Author

Alastair Ross

Chalmers, Biology and Biological Engineering, Food and Nutrition Science

Jan-Willem van der Kamp

Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO)

Roberto King

Nestle S.A.

Kim-Anne Lê

Nestle S.A.

Heddie Mejborn

Technical University of Denmark (DTU)

C. J. Seal

Newcastle University

F. Thielecke

Thielecke Consultancy

Advances in nutrition (Bethesda, Md.)

21618313 (ISSN) 21565376 (eISSN)

Vol. 8 4 525-531

Subject Categories

Food Science

Food Engineering

Nutrition and Dietetics

Areas of Advance

Life Science Engineering (2010-2018)

DOI

10.3945/an.116.014001

PubMed

28710140

More information

Latest update

8/6/2020 9