Here’s the first thing you should know about food labels: DO NOT BELIEVE THEM!!!
Food labels are tricky stuff. They are manipulated so that you read them a certain way and convince you to buy the product so never believe them 100%. You can buy sugar-free, no trans fat, “natural”, and the world keeps gaining weight. I think this tells you that food labels don’t say the whole story. Food label regulations are often very complex and in favor of the food company, so why should you trust them? My personal recommendation is to choose whole unprocessed natural products and ditch the stuff with food labels but in today’s world that might be too hard to do from one day to another. Read this article and learn how to separate the junk from the real food in your own pantry.
First, I want to talk about the FDA, the agency that regulates food labels, or should I say “regulates”. The FDA does not require foods to be laboratory tested for nutritional information. SHOCKER, right? They only check that the label is there, not that it’s accurate. The law allows them to estimate nutritional content of carbs, fat, protein, sugar, etc and they consider that a 20% margin of error is acceptable. In an article on “Which?” magazine food testers analyzed 70 food products and found that 93% of them were inaccurate. One pizza actually contained 47% more sugar than what it stated. I think this is reason enough not to believe in food labels but I’ll keep on explaining how they try to fool us.
The second reason why we should not believe food labels is that they manipulate portion sizes to appear “healthier”. For example, those 100 calorie packs, most people eat twice the serving size and don’t even realize it. How about a label on “What if I eat the whole thing?”. The FDA also has regulations regarding if a serving size has less than an x amount of an ingredient. This is the case of trans fat, if it has less than 0.5grams of it then it can actually say 0 grams. So food companies make the serving size ridiculously small to say that it’s trans fat free. You can see this very often when you see a “fat free” product that lists ‘palm oil” as an ingredient but it’s fat free, simply impossible! The same is true for “sugar free” cookies that have cane sugar as an ingredient; of course they have a serving size of a ¼ cookie. Simple math just doesn’t apply in food labels.
There is one thing you should pay attention to in food labels, the ingredients list. Ingredients are always listed by quantity from highest to lowest. It’s a good habit to scan at least the first 3 ingredients and make sure they don’t include any sugars, hydrogenated oils, or refined grains. Another good tip is not to choose foods that have 3 lines or more of ingredients; very often this means it’s highly processed. Also, if you can’t even pronounce an ingredient, stay away from it! Look it up and always know what you are putting in your body. Even the smallest amounts of an unhealthy ingredient can have negative effects in the body and weight gain.
Last but not least I want to give you guys a quick pointer on the claims in front of the package. COMPLETELY IGNORE THEM! These claims are not closely regulated so you are better off just reading the ingredients list. You may see a “whole grain” bread that has bleached refined flour as a first ingredient and actually whole grains as a last ingredient in very small amounts. The term “multigrain” just means it has many grains and most can very well be refined unhealthy grains. My favorite is the word “natural” this just means that at some point the manufacturer had a natural source, the rest of the ingredients can be anything but natural.
I hope to have encouraged you to choose more whole unprocessed foods. Naturally by choosing the right kind of whole foods you will always start to loose weight. When you have to choose something with a label, choose smart and don’t be fooled by nasty food companies! 🙂
Book a trip with me to your local supermarket to learn how to choose the right kind of foods and learn more on nutrition labels!
Stay balanced,
Nati
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