helmet bunny :
This morning as I flip through twitter trying to get caught up on the world, and seeing what my favorite tweeters had for breakfast, I came across this tweet:
@EatThisNotThat: MISLEADING LABEL: Organic Kraft Mac & Cheese isn’t much healthier! It cuts 20 calories & 1 g fat. 18 Supermarket Lies: http://ow.ly/4rwJB
This tweet sparked my interest because 1) I knew it was true, 2) I wanted to know which products they were going to list, and 3) this was a perfect opportunity to talk to you about some of the stuff I know about food, that lots of people don’t.
LABELS LIE. And it’s totally legal.
Major companies can make claims like, “Made with Natural Ingredients!” This means that ONE ingredient that can have less than 1% presence in the product has to be natural for them to paste NATURAL on the label. When you read “Natural” a little trigger goes off in your brain that say’s “Natural is good. Buy natural.” And you do, without second guessing it. Read the label. And see HOW they use the word… context is key. Recently Wendy’s re-launched their fries to appeal to the health rage going on right now. “Natural Cut Fries Made with Sea Salt” Sounds good, right? Well, Natural CUT. NATURAL CUT. Is there an un-natural way to cut something? And “made with sea salt” – sea is a general term, which encompasses all bodies of water. What I’m trying to say is, really, all salt can be called sea salt. Kudos to Wendy’s if they’re only using that salt though… but I’m going to guess that due to the incredible cost of pure salt, they are also cutting that sea salt with potassium chloride because it’s inexpensive.
Companies also paste “Low Fat!” on their labels, which can just be LOWER fat… and there is no regulation on this claim. It could have a ton of fat. You gotta READ the label and decide for yourself if it’s low enough to consume. And, if it does have low fat, make sure they didn’t make up for it by spiking the sugar or adding a ton of preservatives instead of natural ingredients to lower the fat.
“0% trans fat” 0% means less than .49% which can seriously add up. Companies purposely make sure their serving size is in tow to hit an “attractive” nutrition label. So, if the serving was 3oz, that yielded a .6% trans fat serving, you better believe that they changed the serving size to 2.5oz so that it hit below .49% and they didn’t need to list the major nutritional transgression on the package. They did not reformulate to say, “Now with 0% Trans Fat!” they just changed their serving size. They tricked you.
There are 100’s of claims like this. The Eat This Not That makes an example out of 18 different products in the above listed article, but the lesson here is: EAT NATURAL, AND USE YOUR JUDGMENT.
Seriously, does it matter that Cheeto’s have 0% Trans Fat (.49%)? Does that make them seem like something you should be eating now? Good God I hope not. You are old enough to know better.
xo-kl