Legislative regulation of sports nutrition production and turnover

Abstract

Special products used for nutrition of athletes form a separate segment of the food market, which remains on the rise, despite the economic crisis. Today the market share of sports nutrition is about 3 % of total food production. Market of this commodity group in Ukraine is developing rapidly as well. That is why the problem of regulation of quality and safety of sports nutrition is becoming more urgent. Since independence, Ukraine has taken a consistent position in regard to choosing the course on European integration. The purpose of the paper is the analysis of Ukrainian and European legislation in the field of production and turnover of sports nutrition.
The current state of regulation of sports nutrition in Ukraine is described in the paper. The main shortcomings of the current legislation and possible directions of reforming are determined.
Detailed analysis of current European legislation, which can serve as a model for reforms, is given. Recently, the EU decided to review the existing legislation in order to simplify the rules for dietary foods. According to initiators, the current basic Directive is too complicated and in practice causes difficulties for both producers and regulatory agencies. In particular, it is planned to exclude sports nutrition from the list of the legislation on dietetic foods; these products would be regulated as regular foods. The positive and negative aspects of these changes are given in the paper and several examples of how they will influence on producers, marketers and consumers of sports nutrition are provided.
How suitable can such changes be for Ukraine? Is it possible to exclude sports nutrition from the list of the legislation on special foods in Ukraine as well? The problem is that there is no proper regulation regarding nutrition and health claims made on foods in Ukraine. Moreover, despite the active growth of the domestic market, the main consumers of sports nutrition are professional athletes, and it is distributed generally through special trade network. Common consumers are poorly informed about the specifics of this group of products, so the only source of information for them are labeling and promotional materials, the accuracy of which depends only on the conscientiousness of producers. The problem of the effectiveness evaluation of special foods is still not resolved properly. An effective mechanism to control the reliability of the manufacturer’s claims about the specific properties of their products, based on a scientific approach, has to be developed before. The development of hygienic regulations for sports nutrition and lists of permitted and prohibited substances is also an important aspect. There is an urgent necessity to ensure transparency of the procedure of products evaluation by establishing a generalized and publicly available criteria and methods. Only after that regulation of the production and turnover of sports nutrition can be done on the general principles and requirements to food products.