Australia’s five-star food nutritional labelling program needs an urgent revamp to ensure fruit and vegetables are clearly marked as healthy, a major review has found.

The Federal Government’s Health Star Rating system is meant to help consumers make healthy food choices by allowing manufacturers to voluntarily place an independently calculated, easy-to-read nutritional score on their packaging.

With its logo now on some 5448 products, the program has been billed as a win-win for public health and the food industry because it gives manufacturers a marketing tool for their healthy products and people a source of simple nutritional advice in supermarket aisles.

But a government-commissioned review of the system has found major flaws in how the system calculates its scores out of five stars.