Unhealthy supermarket products

Can you leave it to the supermarkets themselves to make the range healthier?

Unhealthy supermarket products

Starting this month, Questionmark will get back to work on the Superlist for 2025. In it, the independent think tank compares how Aldi, Albert Heijn, Dirk, Ekoplaza, Jumbo, Lidl and PLUS help their customers eat healthily. It will be published in November. The last edition was not the best, with most supermarkets failing to meet or only partly meeting their joint commitments. Ekoplaza clearly scored the best.

• Link to Questionmark superlist

Deception of supermarkets

Actually, you could feel this on your nails. Sometimes I compare supermarkets to soft-drug dealers, because they sell a lot of products full sugar, fat, salt and alcohol that can produce all kinds of often desirable effects in the brain. Many people therefore buy these kinds of products not to satisfy their hunger, but for mental reasons. For instance, they can use this short-term feeling of happiness in negative moments to reward themselves (numb) or in good mental moments to put themselves even further into an upper.

Seduction in our obesogenic environment

This makes it very difficult for many people to get into a 'Obese world' full of this temptation average healthy behaviour and stay healthy. The supermarket is an important part of this seductive and sometimes even misleading world, but can you ask the soft-drug dealers to solve this soft-drug problem themselves? And this, while the government is not implementing tough new rules that usually make you the best boy in the class financially beaten off by the competitor and go bankrupt. I think not.

Government's move

So the situation is very bad for the average Dutch person, who in recent years has fallen into a kind of survival mode financially and actually has little motivation and priority in terms of long-term health. In my opinion, the government should do 2 things:

1. Convert the Nutrition Centre into the Centre for Promoting Motivation for Healthy Behaviour. A knowledge centre there is really of little use to the Netherlands, because people don't queue up at McDonald's because of lack of knowledge: "Oops, but I thought this food was healthy!". Yeah right!
2. Establish tough rules to make our environment less obesogenic. Healthy behaviour must become easier and unhealthy temptations must become less. The supermarket is an important part of this, as the supermarket still abuses psychological tricks To get people to buy as much as they can and just from the unhealthy ultra-processed products. And no, this is not about banning certain products or making them unaffordable through taxation, because coercion, compulsion and restriction of the citizen's freedom is a dangerous government tool, as we have again experienced in recent years. We should not want that in my opinion.

Helping individuals

So temptation needs to come down and motivation and priority for healthy food choices needs to go up. This could make the Netherlands healthier. And what is my role as a health coach and writer of the hormone factor?

I think I can play a very modest role in this. After all, my target group tends to be a lot more motivated and aware than most Dutch people. I can help these people individually and hopefully this will influence the demand for healthy products, thus creating more of a market for them.

And when I look at the number of healthy choices that have been added to supermarkets in recent years, I am actually very positive for my target audience. I can thus work with the shopping coaches help my target audience find these healthy alternatives and make them even more resilient against temptations through mental coaching.

Everything is about money

But then, do I think the whole of the Netherlands can be helped? The government is mainly concerned with plans to rake in even more money through sugar or fat taxes and with useless food industry-friendly instruments such as the Nutriscore. In my expectation, this is really never, ever going to work.