When Dorcas often grabs a chilled bottle of her favorite soft drink after lunch, she rarely thinks about how much sugar she pours into her body.
For the 29-year-old secretary, who works in Accra, the sweetness is satisfying; the small print on the label of the drink is too technical for her to worry about.
Nutrition experts, however, warn that a single 300ml bottle of soda can contain as many as nine cubes of sugar, twice the recommended daily limit.
“Even when you dilute it with water, the sugar content doesn’t reduce. Your tongue may not taste it, but your body absorbs every gram,” says Harriett Nuamah Agyemang, the Country Director of SEND Ghana, which is pushing for Front-of-Pack Labelling (FOPL) to help Ghanaians make healthier food choices.
Poor diets, urban lifestyles and the growing appetite for processed foods have been linked to the rise in non-communicable diseases (NCDs) in Ghana in recent times, including hypertension, diabetes and heart diseases, according to data from the Ghana Health Service (GHS).
The data shows that more than 584,000 people were diagnosed with hypertension and nearly 200,000 with diabetes in 2024 alone.
Within the first half of 2025, another 255,000 hypertension and 88,000 diabetes cases have already been recorded.
Statistics from the World Health Organisation (WHO) shows that NCDs such as stroke, hypertension, cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, cancers and chronic respiratory tract infections accounts for about 48 per cent of all deaths in Ghana.
In 2019, the age-standardised mortality rate for the major NCDs was about 750 per 100,000 for males and 563 per 100,000 for females in Ghana.
Recent studies project that by 2034, around 41 per cent of deaths in Ghana could be linked to complications of four major NCDs; stroke, heart attack, heart failure, and chronic kidney disease mainly driven by changing diets, notably increased consumption of processed foods, sugar-sweetened beverages, high-salt and high-fat foods.
Public health experts say the figures reflect a “sick food environment” in which consumers are increasingly surrounded by high-sugar, high-salt and high-fat products.
From instant noodles and tomato paste to fizzy drinks and packaged snacks, ultra-processed foods have become a fixture in Ghanaian diets.
Ms Nuamah Agyeman, the SEND Ghana country director, explained that for many families, processed foods were cheaper and faster to prepare as compared to fresh and traditional foods.
“People spend hours in traffic and get home late, they go for the quick options; canned, instant, or fried, but the long-term cost to their health is enormous,” she said.
Currently Ghana’s nutrition labelling rules allows manufacturers to list nutritional information on the back of packages often in fine print that few consumers can interpret.
“Even educated consumers struggle to understand it, for the ordinary person, it’s even more confusing,” Ms Agyemang said.
Front-of-Pack Labelling, already adopted in countries like South Africa, Nigeria, Chile and Mexico, presents key nutrition details in simple symbols or colours on the front of packaging.
The WHO describes Front-of-Pack Labelling as a tool that makes healthy choices visible at a glance and encourages food producers to reformulate their products to avoid “red” warnings for excessive sugar, salt or fat.
The Front-of-Pack Labelling, Ms Agyeman said, did not only guide shoppers, but forced companies to compete on health and not just price.
At the Rawlings Park in Accra, Asia Bintu, a food vendor, said she hardly paid attention to labels.
“When I’m shopping, I just look at the size and expiry date, I don’t really understand what the numbers and all those tiny inscriptions mean, I prefer canned foods because they are cheaper and easy to cook,” she said.
Asia’s response, just like many Ghanian cooks and food vendors, captures the challenge of food literacy in the country, a gap that nutrition advocates say must be closed through education and regulation.
Mr Labram Musah, the National Coordinator, Ghana NCD Alliance, said schools were a critical part of the solution.
“Children are increasingly exposed to unhealthy diets, especially in urban areas. What they eat in school shapes their lifelong habits.”
Mr Musah wants the government to enforce clear rules on what can be sold in and around schools and to promote practical nutrition education, including school gardens and healthy meal plans.
“It is not enough to tell children to eat fruits and vegetables. We must make them available and affordable. Imagine if every school had a small garden – it would change how children think about food,” he said.
He called on the government to integrate Front-of-Pack Labelling into Ghana’s broader NCD prevention strategy, as well as measures such as salt reduction, sugar taxes, and restrictions on marketing ultra-processed foods to children.
The WHO indicates that clear food labelling can drive healthier product reformulation and reduce diet-related diseases over time.
For SEND Ghana’s Ms Agyemang, awareness saves lives and reading a label could be the difference between good health and a lifetime of medication.
“If we don’t act now, we will keep spending millions treating preventable diseases,” she noted.
In a randomised controlled trial in Kenya, involving 2,198 shoppers, front-of-pack labeling (FOPL) significantly increased the ability of participants to correctly identify nutrients of concern : sugar, salt, saturated fat, which reduced the intention to purchase unhealthy foods, especially when a “warning label” (black octagon) format was used.
Similarly, findings of a study on the effectiveness of FOPL in assisting South African consumers to identify unhealthy food packages showed that simplified front-of-pack warning labels helped consumers to identify unhealthy packaged foods more easily, compared to complex back-of-pack tables.
For Ghana, focusing on NCD prevention more than cure will ease the many pressures on health facilities.
The Government must invest in Front of Pack Labelling as it fosters a broader healthy food environment because it makes the nutritional quality of foods visible at the point of choice, supporting consumers and policy.
