Reply to Aguenaou et al. Comment on "Muzzioli et al. Are Front-of-Pack Labels a Health Policy Tool? Nutrients 2022, 14 , 771"

[...]on 27 September 2021, the WHO stated that “at present WHO is not able to recommend the use of any specific scheme over another” [4]; Regarding the use of FOPLs as drivers for reformulation, data reveal that “studies on food manufacturers’ responses to FOP labels are limited in both number and strength of evidence”, as stated in the document published by the European Commission in 2020 [5]. [7], theorised as a study framework, there is also a call for an urgent “need (for) more insight into whether labels actually are used in guiding buying decisions and with what effect”, confirming the lack of a consensus in the scientific community. [...]the authors stated that “this is a difficult topic and can only be investigated by using a combination of different approaches” to research how FOPLs affect consumers’ dietary patterns and their behaviour in real-world setting, which is precisely what we suggested and that “there is, however, virtually no insight into how labelling information is, or will be, used in a real-world shopping situation, and how it will affect consumers’ dietary patterns”; The meta-analysis by Song et al. [...]even if the authors found that different labels appear to have beneficial effects on the purchase of healthy food products, they also stated that “study limitations included high heterogeneity and inconsistency in the comparisons across different label types, limited number of real-world studies (95% were laboratory studies), and lack of long-term impact assessment”. [...]the authors acknowledged a certain number of limitations: “first, compared to the relatively large amount of evidence on the purchasing behaviour elicited by FOPLs, the data on food consumption were quite limited. […] [...]the studies have not verified the real impact of the food certification system on the health status, but they only assessed the risk of disease through a macro-simulation; Concerning our citation of the study by Hagmann et al.