Food high in salt, sugar and fat could still carry a healthy tag after the European Parliament voted on Thursday to water down key European Union draft rules to fight obesity, Reuters reported. Consumer organisations criticised the vote while EU lawmakers blamed the decision on heavy lobbying by food firms opposed to tougher labelling requirements. "There's been quite a strong fight between two positions -- those who wanted to protect the big (food) industry and those who wanted to protect consumers (from) being misled by false information," Italian far-right EU lawmaker Adriana Poli Bortone told a news conference. The European Commission wants to tackle the rising obesity rate in Europe, where the number of overweight children is rising by 400,000 a year according to its own figures. It wants to ban misleading health and nutritional claims on food. Under the Commission's draft proposal, all claims would have to be scientifically proven. Food firms would also be barred from labelling food as healthy if it had high fat, sugar and salt levels. --More 1831 Local Time 1531 GMT
