Health Foods that Really Aren'tby Ken Schweickert |
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It can be a pain to read through the whole nutrition label on everything we eat. So those advertisements on the side of the box telling you that the product will lower your cholesterol or that it is a smart choice seem like pretty good time savers. Except with a slight advantage to the company. Take the time to read the label on one of those boxes some time and you are likely to find that it tends not to look quite so good for you after that. To help encourage you to go through with reading the whole box, I will tear apart a few examples that I found.
Let’s examine a certain cereal box that I came across. It advertises that it can lower my cholesterol, lower my blood pressure, and is low in sodium (so everything is low... including my confidence that this is a half-decent cereal). On the front of the box in huge print are the words “Healthy Heart.” So we’ve established that this cereal should be good for me, right? Now let’s examine everything else on the box.
On the front this description of the cereal is given: “Lightly sweetened, toasted oat bran flakes and crunchy oat clusters.” I would like to emphasize the word “Lightly” which appears in front of sweetened. Lightly sweetened (there, I put it in italics).
Ingredients: Oat bran, rice, sugar, oat clusters (sugar, toasted oats [rolled oats, sugar, high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated soybean oil, molasses, honey], wheat flakes, crisp rice [rice, sugar, malt, salt], corn syrup, polydextrose, honey, cinnamon, BHT for freshness, artificial vanilla flavor), high fructose corn syrup, malt flavoring, potassium chloride, salt, syrup, malt flavoring, potassium chloride, salt, backing soda, ascorbic acid (vitamin C), niacinamide, zinc oxide, reduced iron, calcium pantothenate, pyridoxine hydrochloride (vitamin B6), riboflavin (vitamin B2), thiamin hydrochloride (vitamin B1), BHT (preservative), vitamin A palmitate, folic acid, vitamin B12, vitamin D.
I’ve highlighted everything that’s sugar.
Hey, that’s a lot of sugar. And hey, that’s probably also not quite as good for me as you made it sound. You JERK! Also notice all of the occurrences of “malt,” which isn’t, in it’s own, a sugar, but converts starches to sugar. I also underlined a hydrogenated oil that found its way in there. That happens to be very bad for your heart, but we’ll talk about that a little later.
My next example comes from a name that we trust to make our oatmeal. No, my example is not oatmeal itself. There isn’t a lot of room to mess that up considering that it consists of… oats. However, when you see a product made from the oatmeal brand, that has oatmeal in it, you probably expect them to do a pretty good job to keep it healthy. Especially when just about every side of the box has an inviting label boasting “Good Source of Fiber*, Excellent Source of Calcium & Iron, and 0g Trans Fat.” The only asterisk in that little patch of healthy-sounding words is after the fiber which is followed up by the phrase “Contains 6g of total fat per serving,” but none by the trans fat. So I’m reading through the label thinking “hmm that’s a lot of ingredients, so many in fact, that if I were going to write an article on Kustom Fitness about it, I don’t think I would want to write them all.” But I included a picture (see the bottom), although I doubt even if you blew it up if that thing would be legible. At least you get the idea that there were a lot of ingredients on that piece. So anyway, as I’m reading through the ingredients I come across a long line of hydrogenated oils. But hey, don’t hydrogenated oils add trans fatty acids? Why yes, actually they do (read my article about it). There just happens to be an asterisk next to those hydrogenated oils. Problem is, I cannot seem find the corresponding asterisk containing the friggin footnote! What good is it to even put it there in the first place if you’re not going to tell me anything about it you dirty oatmeal company! Now I start getting a little angry. And the curiosity is starting to swell up into a big ball of an even more intense curiosity. So I start ripping the thing to pieces. Oh, there it is! They must have thought that this would be a convenient place for me to find it... glued underneath one of the flaps that is. I stumble across the other asterisk that has been causing me so much trouble all this time. Right under where a flap from the box used to be glued (until I destroyed it) I see “**Adds a dietarily insignificant amount of trans fat.” Oh, well that’s just… interesting. I would also like to point out that my spellchecker is going mad crazy over the word “dietarily.” It’s insignificant as in not enough to be written on the nutrition label. NOT insignificant as in too little to affect your body. Keep this in mind: Trans fats raise your bad cholesterol and lower your good cholesterol. You get hit twice with this stuff. Doesn’t that sound like something you should be getting as close to none of as possible? Of course everybody eats a little, even if by mistake (maybe it was hidden underneath a flap on the box for example). Well, what did you expect from a heathy product line brought to you by Pepsi Co.?
You might want to read the label a little closer next time. Do not be afraid to look away from the name brand and buy your local supermarket’s off brand of the product. After all, how much does it mean to buy the brand name of a health food product when that brand just so happens to be a major soda corporation?
See for yourself, they did a pretty good job of making that last asterisk hard to find (infact, you could not even make out “trans” before fat).
Sorry about the bottom getting cut off in the first picture there (I should consider having somebody else do the photography).
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