ALTO EN seals on the shelf
Shopping for a meal during a visit to Chile can bring an unfamiliar label into view: ALTO EN, or “high in”. For Chilean-Australians moving between kitchens and languages, understanding those words is part of reading the food on the shelf. The Chilean Ministry of Health's explanation of the seals says that one or more warnings mean a product exceeds its limits for sodium, sugars, saturated fat or calories. The aim is to make that information visible at a glance, rather than requiring a detailed reading of the nutrition label.
The labels sit within a wider policy. A 2020 study in PLOS Medicine describes Chile's Law of Food Labeling and Advertising, implemented in 2016, as the first national regulation to combine these warnings with restrictions on marketing to children and a ban on school sales of foods and drinks meeting its high-in criteria. Children are the subject of those policy provisions; for an adult shopper, the visible seal is the everyday part of the system.
Why sugar, salt and saturated fat
The words on a packet point towards a broader question: why draw attention to these parts of food? The World Health Organization's healthy-diet guidance identifies unhealthy diets as a major risk factor for disease and disability. It also describes a shift towards more highly processed foods containing unhealthy fats, free sugars and salt. This is the public-health context behind looking beyond a packet's familiar flavour or appearance.
For free sugars, WHO recommends less than 10% of total daily energy. Its example is 50 grams, or about 12 level teaspoons, for a person of healthy body weight consuming about 2,000 calories a day. That is an example across a day's intake, rather than a sugar allowance for one packet. It is also different from the product thresholds used by Chile's labelling system.
For adults, WHO recommends less than 5 grams of salt a day, equivalent to 2 grams of sodium. It associates high sodium intake with increased blood pressure, which can lead to cardiovascular disease. For fats, WHO says quality matters and favours unsaturated over saturated fat. These recommendations give the label's terms context; they are not a personalised eating plan for someone preparing dinner in Sydney or shopping during a stay in Chile.
What the seals ask of shoppers
A warning is not a prohibition. In its guidance on using the food warnings, the Ministry says the seals do not forbid eating foods that carry them. Instead, it invites gradual changes, preferring foods with no seals or fewer seals. That makes the message something an adult can consider during ordinary shopping, without turning a familiar meal into a test of cultural loyalty.
The Ministry also explains the absence of seals in terms of foods without sodium, sugars or saturated fat added during their preparation. Keep that explanation alongside the warning's meaning: the system concerns specified ingredients and thresholds. Reading it carefully is more useful than treating a seal as a verdict on an entire cuisine. When choosing packaged ingredients for a shared table, the Ministry's practical suggestion remains modest: prefer no seals or fewer seals, with changes made gradually.
What changed in Chilean shopping baskets
Researchers have followed purchases to examine what happened after the policy began. The 2020 PLOS Medicine beverage study used monthly packaged-drink purchases from 2,383 urban Chilean households between 2015 and 2017. It compared purchases after implementation with an estimate of what would have happened if the earlier purchasing trend had continued. The comparison was therefore with a projected trend, rather than simply with the previous year's shopping.
Against that projection, the volume of high-in drinks purchased was 23.7% lower, and calories purchased from those drinks were 27.5% lower. These figures describe purchases of the high-in category. They do not describe a fall of that size in everything a household ate or drank, and they are not measurements of changes in people's health.
The authors make several limits explicit. This was observational research, so it could not establish causation. It could not determine how much of the change reflected manufacturers altering recipes and how much reflected shoppers changing their choices. Nor could it separate the effects of warning labels, marketing restrictions and the school sales ban. The findings concern the package of policies.
A 2024 PLOS Medicine follow-up examined food and drink purchases from 2,844 Chilean households between 2013 and 2019. During the law's second phase, relative to a projection based on 36 months of earlier trends, it reported 36.8% less sugar purchased from high-in products, 21.9% less sodium and 15.7% less saturated fat. Purchases of foods and drinks outside the high-in category increased. Patterns were similar across lower and higher socioeconomic groups, but some results were sensitive to using shorter periods before the policy. The timeframe matters when interpreting the numbers.
From Chile to the region
The Pan American Health Organization's account of front-of-package labelling identifies warning systems adopted in Chile, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay. It says independent evidence finds traffic-light systems less effective than nutrition warnings at informing consumers when products contain excessive sugars, fats or sodium. That comparison concerns how a label communicates information; it should not be read as a measurement of an individual shopper's health.
For a visitor, recognising the purpose of a warning offers a useful starting point. A label design is a way of presenting nutrition information, and the Chilean research asks what happened to purchasing alongside a wider set of rules.
Reading a label anywhere
Back in an Australian kitchen, the same words — sugars, sodium and saturated fat — offer familiar points to look for on a nutrition panel. The Chilean seals give those terms a particular public-health setting. Understanding that setting leaves room both for the pleasure of a shared meal and for a careful reading of packaged food.
The distinction to carry across the Pacific is straightforward: the Ministry explains what the warnings mean, WHO gives broader dietary guidance, and the studies describe household purchases. Each answers a different question. Keeping those questions clear makes the labels easier to discuss around the table, without asking the research to promise more than it measured.