SUMMARY

Commercials influence the consumers’ dietary habits at all ages, thus affecting their health. The public queries show that consumers are keen on nutrition and are grateful to count on information involving these nutritional facts on the food packaging. Therefore, the value of the images and words used by advertisers, and their influential power should be analysed. Concepts or prefixes like light, bio-, eco-, organic, fresh, natural and others are taken into account involving the commercial claims of food , analysing the positive or negative value, right or wrong, through which people recognize all these words. A closer look is taken to the different consideration taken by scientists and the rest of the people on a term like bacteria within the field of food.

The relation between health/ advertising when it comes to the foods and the ambiguous use of the different words in their advertising campaigns is emphasized. To enlighten the value of words, the concept of “yoghourt” is argued and taken by example, since it has been subject to polemics regarding the effects of pasteurisation on this product, that has come to affect the Spanish legislation. Given the special features of the commercial market of foods, the autocontrolling and autorregulative mechanisms, that compound a very useful and quick complement to the legal control of advertising are exposed. The problems that bring about the relations between scientific data and legal regulations that affect the labelling and advertising of foods are also exposed, paying special attention to concrete examples like the vitamin C and the folic acid cases. Special attention is also devoted to the commercial claims involving functional foods, like those referring to properties aimed at promoting health or reducing the risk of illness, and to the European frame that will regulate them, as long as the initiatives developed by the Spanish Healthcare Authorities, like the code on Advertising, Physical Activity and Obesity, known as PAOS, in Spanish. Finally, some concrete cases, like those of the fruit and vegetables concentrated juice child food, some ordinary foods (plums and nuts), functional foods with vegetal sterols and weight control products are shown.