Sugar, salt & fat in sweets colour coded from today

The indication of colour codes for Sugar, Salt and Fat content in all sweets including biscuits will be made mandatory from today.

All packaging will bear the colour codes indicating respective levels of Sugar, Salt and Fat content.  Accordingly more than 22 grams of sugar in a 100 gram sweet will be indicated in red, while sugar levels between 8 to 22 grams will be indicated in yellow and 8 grams and less will be indicated in green.

Accordingly the salt content in 100 grams of biscuits or sweets that contains 1.25 grams will be indicated in red, 1.25 to 2.5 grams will be indicated in yellow and 2 to 5 grams of salt will be mentioned in green.

The fat content in sweets will be indicated as red if 100 grams contains 17.5 grams of fat, 3 to 17.5 grams of fat in yellow and less than 3 grams will be indicated in green.

Minister of Health Dr. Rajitha Senaratne stressed the new regulations are being introduced with the objective of controlling non-communicable diseases including diabetes.