Read the food labels

This is an article that says you should ignore the pretty pictures of the advertising and pay attention to what's actually in the food you are reading. Read the Labels. By law, they have to tell you the truth.
Label literacy: how to read past the hype on food packaging
Vegetarian Times, May, 2004 by Alan Pell Crawford

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Don't I feel virtuous today! For breakfast, I ate a blueberry muffin and a big bowl of hearty, "wholesome" cereal. For lunch, I'm having "chunky" soup, a slice of "stone-ground" wheat bread and a few chips with "Great Multigrain Taste!" I may even allow myself oatmeal cookies made with real raisins, washed down with a Lemon Lime Lightning fruit juice--"Now with FruitForce[TM] Energy Releasing B Vitamins!"

Finally, baying eaten so sensibly during the daytime, I may just reward myself at dinner. I've earned it. I'll have a stir-fry but made with "fat-free" cooking spray. Maybe some "sugar-free" ice cream for dessert--rum raisin, for the raisins, which contain antioxidants that "can slow the effects of aging." Then, if I'm hungry late at night, I will microwave some "natural"-flavored popcorn and have a couple of "low-carb" beers.

You got a problem with that? Evidently, a lot of nutritionists do.
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They say that the packaging on foods (and drinks) today has many consumers utterly bamboozled--and our bodies are suffering mightily for it. Slap a picture of a big juicy strawberry on a cereal box, and we think we're getting real fruit. Tell us that bread is made from "wheat flour" and that it's "fortified" with vitamins and minerals, and we think it's even better than the brand that "builds strong bodies 12 ways."

Imply that "reduced-calorie" cookies are good for us, and we'll pay more for them, even though we fully expect them not in taste as good. And if they're not as tasty as the junk we're used to, we'll snarf down more just to compensate for their lack of flavor. By the time we're done, we've consumed more calories than if we'd stuck with the high-fat, sugary concoctions we actually prefer.

Informational Riches

We're funny that way--also downright obtuse. Never in the history of the world has more solid information about the food we eat been readily available--much of it required by federal regulation (see "Can They Say That?," p. 68)--yet few of us take advantage of the informational riches literally at our fingertips. By law, food must carry labels that identify nutritional content and list ingredients in order of predominance. But most of us become so bedazzled by the explosion of colorful advertising on the front of a cereal box or bag of chips that we rarely bother to look at the back or sides of a package where the real information is.

"To know what's in a food and whether it's good for you, you have to look at the nutrition label and ingredient list," says Katherine Tallmadge, a registered dietitian in Washington, DC, author of Diet Simple, national spokesperson for the American Dietetic Association and VT's nutritionist. "They have to tell the truth on the 'Nutrition Facts' label. If the front of the carton says 'orange juice,' you want the first item on the ingredient list to say '100 percent orange juice.'"

Siren Song

The rest of the package, however, may present a siren song of exaggeration and innuendo in which the advertising industry has taken the power of suggestion to a new high--or low.

"The packaging can be confusing," Tallmadge says. "'Reduced-fat' doesn't mean 'low-fat.'"

Whole milk, Tallmadge explains, is 4 percent fat. "So even '2 percent' milk still contains 5 grams of fat per cup, half of which is artery-clogging saturated fat, which isn't much of a reduction, especially if you drink more than 1 cup per day. Put another way, with '2 percent' milk, you're still getting 45 out of 120 calories as fat." For low-fat milk, she says, get skim.

My "low-carb beer," says Lisa Young, PhD, RD, an adjunct assistant professor at New York University's School of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health in Manhattan, is the most ridiculous of all. "A low-carb beer may contain 1 gram less of carbohydrates than a regular beer," she explains. Because 1 gram of carbohydrates contains only 4 calories, your so-called "low-carb" beer may not eliminate very many carbohydrates or calories. "So there's very little gain in drinking a low-carb beer. But because it's 'low-carb,' people think they can drink more of it."

Calorie-Laden "Health" Foods

Looks can be deceiving. "Some breakfast foods that may look like health food are loaded with calories," Young warns. "A lot of supposedly healthful breads are white bread with brown coloring added. All bread is wheat bread because it's made from kernels of wheat. But unless the first ingredient on the ingredient list is '100 percent whole wheat,' you're getting white bread with stuff added to it, including color. 'Fortified' just means some of the iron and B vitamins that were lost when the wheat was bleached have been replaced."

Calcium and vitamin C are similarly added to "fruit drinks," which Young considers equally absurd. "They're putting stuff in sugared punch," she notes. "Parents who want children to have these nutrients should give them orange juice or milk."