Food Labels and Junk Food

August 10, 2010 admin No comments

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Hi,

The junk industry has come up with a two prong attack regarding food labels.

The first is to make distracting claims on the label so that you don’t read the food label.

Such statements like reduced fat, zero trans fats, contains real fruit juice are plastered all over the front of the container.

These statements are designed to create the impression that the product is healthy.

And the statement is usually true. You can reduce a fat in a product by 1/2% and claim it has reduced fat. But, is it healthier for you.

Maybe they also increased the sodium content of the product by 50%, but they sure aren’t going to tell you that.

You are at the grocery store, picking something up on your way home from work. You are in a hurry and just want to get in and out of the store. You see some deli meats and one says reduced fat.

Hey, reduced fat is good, You are going to get that. So you throw that in the basket and move on without even bothering to compare that products protein, fat, salt or sugar contents with other products.

And maybe the reduced fat product still has twice as much fat as another product that didn’t label their product as reduced fat.

Or let’s use my favorite – contains real fruit juice. If you read the label you will see that it is almost always less than 20% real fruit juice and I have seen it as low as 2% real fruit juice.

Of course having real fruit juice sounds good and the costs are usually a little more.

What these labels do is make the consumer forget about really comparing the value of the product with other hopefully more nutrient products that you could be eating.

Okay, the second thing the junk food industry does is to go all out to comply with labeling requirements. In fact they go overboard to satisfy the requirements.

They do this to keep you confused and bored. Have you ever tried to really figure out those labels? If you can get by all the technical and scientific jargon, then you have to have a calculator in your head to figure out what you are really getting.

The real big gotcha is the serving size. Most people look at a product and if they look at the amount of sugar and see only 17 gms of sugar they think, well that is okay.

However, if they looked at the serving size and saw that there were 2.5 servings per bottle, then they are really getting 42.5 gms of sugar. That is a big jump.

But, this info is hard to find and because they try to put so much info on the labels it is hard to read for us that need reading glasses.

I am one of those people and I never take my reading glasses to buy groceries. So I am always squinting at the labels or asking someone to read them for me.

Most people won’t take the time to do that.

Will you?

Thanks,

Mike Val