卫生部：中国正在提高食品安全

China’s food safety has been in the public eye in recent years after a number of scandals. During a press conference in Beijing on Monday, the Health Ministry details the 12th five-year plan for food safety. It shows that the country is making an effort to upgrade regulations and revamp industry standards.

How to eat safely has become a nationwide concern for people in China. Officials from the health ministry said "Food Safety" comes from having qualified raw materials.

Therefore the central government is aiming to invest more to improve county-level quality inspection centers to ensure food hygiene in the next three years.

Su Zhi, deputy director of Health Supervision Bureau, MOH, said, "The administration is making efforts to expand the number of qualified personnel from 93,000 to more than 100,000 by the end of 2015. Moreover, the government will make special efforts to set standards for testing various contaminants, food additives and animal drug residue in food production by then."

Also at the end of 2015, existing standards will be overhauled and will reflect coordinated decisions made by 14 government departments. Under the strategy, 269 new national food safety standards will be enacted.

In addition, the government will make special efforts to set National Standards for the Nutrition Labelling of Pre-packaged Food.

The new Nutrition Labelling of Pre-packaged Food Regulation comes into force on January 1st next year, experts say it will help standardize the nutrition facts labelling by food producers and facilitate consumers’ rights to know and choose, while improving public awareness of food nutrition.

The labeling on all pre-packaged food will be required to include energy, as well as the values of the core nutrients and their percentages of the Nutrient Reference Values or "NRV". However NRV is a professional term that consumers often find it hard to follow.

A researcher from China’s national institute of nutrition and food safety explained the concept.

Yang Yuexin, researcher of National Institute of Nutrition & Food Safety, said, “We can treat the NRV as a ruler to measure the amount of core nutrients that we take in each day. When you consume 100 percent of the NRV, it means you have taken enough for a day’s energy input."

When other ingredients are marked in a proper table, it makes the energy and the core nutrients more visible for consumers when they purchase pre-packaged food.