Only 43% of menu items at the UK’s highest-grossing restaurant chains met all their voluntary targets for sugar, salt, and calorie reduction, as set by the UK Government. These findings were published in a study in the open-access journal PLOS Medicine by Alice O’Hagan of the University of Oxford, UK, and colleagues.
“Our findings demonstrate that there was low adherence to the UK Government’s sugar, salt, and calorie reduction targets in 2024,” the authors say. “This is consistent with other research that finds limited effectiveness of voluntary regulation on reformulation, suggesting that mandatory regulation may be a more effective approach to improving the nutritional quality of out-of-home food.”