Forty years after the Ottawa Charter on Health Promotion, its central idea remains as relevant as ever: to protect their health, people need conditions that enable them to make genuinely informed choices. Chile’s Food Labelling and Advertising Law was born from that conviction, and from a very concrete injustice. Before the law, the market operated on an asymmetry: food manufacturers knew what their products contained and could present them as healthy even when they were not. Consumers, by contrast, had to make decisions based on incomplete or difficult-to-interpret information. What we sought to restore was a basic right: the right to know.
That is why we speak of citizen-consumers. The aim was never to prevent people from buying a product, but to ensure that they could make informed choices about what was in front of them. If a food contains excessive amounts of sugar, sodium, saturated fats or calories, that information cannot remain hidden in a nutritional table that few people understand.
The black octagonal warning label, first implemented in Chile and later an inspiration for many other countries, emerged from the same principle. Initially, we considered a traffic-light system, but the proposal faced strong resistance from the business sector, and the bill was even subject to a presidential veto. Under President Michelle Bachelet, we later resumed the search for the most effective front-of-pack labelling system. Studies and focus groups with children showed that they found the traffic-light system confusing, but later identified the black octagon as the clearest, most visible and easiest warning to understand.
Over time, we even came to be grateful to the industry’s opposition to the traffic-light system, because that resistance forced us to find a better solution. We wanted a symbol that a four-year-old child could understand, because if a four-year-old can understand it, everyone can.
Changing industry incentives
What we ultimately created was a smart law: it is easy to understand, but it also creates incentives for industry to change and reformulate its products. Today, products that exceed the regulatory thresholds must carry warning labels and are subject to restrictions: they cannot be advertised in the media; they cannot use stickers, animations, games or other promotional devices; they cannot be sold in schools or purchased through public procurement programmes. But if a company reformulates a product so that it falls below the established thresholds, those restrictions no longer apply.
The evidence shows that these incentives worked. Around 25% of products were reformulated sufficiently to no longer require warning labels. But the changes went further: products that continued to carry warnings also reduced the proportion of sugar, sodium, saturated fats or calories in their formulations. Subsequent studies also found a significant reduction in purchases of products classified as ‘high in’ unhealthy ingredients. In 2026, The Lancet provided further evidence of the law’s health effects: a study of more than 320,000 children found a measurable reduction in excess weight associated with the first phase of the law. And the feared economic consequences did not materialise. A study published in Nutrients found no impact on aggregate employment or on the size of firms in the sector.
Behind these results lies a misleading concept. Today, we refer to obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease as non-communicable diseases, when in fact they are among the most transmissible diseases of our time. They are not transmitted by viruses or other biological agents. They are transmitted through advertising and neuromarketing, deliberately designed mechanisms that shape behaviour, consumption and the environments in which people make choices. If these diseases were truly non-communicable, there would be little we could do. But the opposite is true: there is an enormous amount we can do.
Beyond food labelling
The warning labels were only the beginning, and there is still much more to be done. I co-authored legislation that has since been enacted in Chile, promoting at least 60 minutes of physical activity, play or sport each day in schools. We are also working to introduce taxes on foods carrying warning labels. We have also proposed a ‘green card’, a food assistance programme that would provide vulnerable families with funds that could only be spent on healthy foods, primarily fresh fruit and vegetables, at authorised shops and local farmers’ markets.
Chile’s experience offers a lesson that goes far beyond food labelling. Promoting health means acting before disease appears. It means correcting the asymmetries between citizens and the market, changing incentives, and giving people back the genuine capacity to make their own decisions. That is what it means to redistribute power.
