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Look Beyond the Label

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Isn’t it easy to eat healthy these days? Perusing the aisles at the grocery store, I’m struck by the vast array of wholesome foods out there. I know they’re wholesome because of the straightforward packaging. With labels like “trans-fat free”, “more fibre”, “less sodium” and “lowers cholesterol”, one simply can’t go wrong. It’s a breeze to choose foods that are new and improved and decidedly better for me. How did people ever know what to choose before? 

It’s quite ironic that a lot of the foods that tout health claims on their packaging aren’t actually that healthy. More often that not, they’re highly processed, sugar-laden food products (the critical difference between foods and what I’m calling food products is the degree of processing or chemical alteration). Manufacturers use careful strategies to market their food products by making consumers think that because something is marginally healthier than its previous incarnation, it is therefore healthy. The majority of us truly have a hard time telling the difference and if we look around, we can clearly see the negative impact that this is having on our waistlines. 

A prime example of this kind of marketing strategy is baked potato chips. We’ve all been to a shindig where there’s a feeding frenzy when the host breaks out the crisps. What’s forgotten is that they’re still potato chips, and are not a nutritious replacement to standard junk food. Most of a potato’s nutrients exist in the skin, or just under the skin, which is usually removed in commercial potato chip brands. Also, many of the baked brands use dehydrated potatoes, which, after processing, can result in a significant nutritional loss in the product. On the nutritional breakdown on the backs of packages, there are scant amounts of nutrients and minerals like vitamin A, C, iron, and calcium. At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if a potato chip is baked, has less salt or less fat, it is not a healthy type of food.

The margarine brand Becel has long been running a “Love Your Heart” campaign (and judging from the commercials featuring flocks of women in red, somehow manages to make a tenuous connection between margarine and women’s empowerment). The boast is that Becel is trans-fat free and low in saturated fat. Butter, the more natural choice, does contain saturated fat. But is saturated fat really that bad in limited quantities? Margarine has jockeyed ahead in consumer perception as the healthier of the two by capitalizing on saturated fat’s bad reputation.

Margarine is made through an extensive process of chemical alteration, butter is not. Margarine is made by adding hydrogen to unsaturated bonds in controlled conditions, while butter is made by churning, so it comes as no surprise that the margarine Becel has a number of unfamiliar-sounding ingredients. I don’t argue the claim that too much saturated fat is unhealthy (just like too much of anything can be unhealthy). However, the difference is that butter is a food and margarine is a food product. Whether or not it is trans-fat free or low in saturated fat does not change the reality that it is still highly processed.

When did ingredient listings get so long? Even boring old bread has been pumped full of chemicals, preservatives and fillers, and some of the ingredients that sound decent are masquerading for highly processed ones. Wonder Bread is stacking shelves with its new “Enriched White” bread. The brand claims that you can have all the nutrition of whole wheat bread, but if you take a gander at the ingredient listing, the first thing on the list is “enriched wheat flour”. The Food and Drug Administration allows refined white flour to be labeled as “enriched wheat flour” or “wheat flour”, which is not nearly as good for you as the baked-daily, whole-grain loaf of bread it tries to imitate.

This leads me to a simple rule of thumb: One way to avoid making poor food choices is to ignore the claims on the front of the packaging and read what’s on the ingredient list. In his book, In Defense of Food, Michael Pollan warns consumers that the foods that proclaim the loudest that they are healthy are, in all likelihood, the least healthy. The foods that are actually healthy are hanging out nonchalantly around the perimeter of the grocery store. Vegetables and other single-ingredient foods aren’t difficult to market as they’ve always been been healthy, with no need to be healthier.

 

Kirsten Gallagher
~ is a certified personal trainer and an avid writer. She works primarily out of Core Strength, Canada’s only clinic devoted to Muscle Activation Techniques.™ 


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