Sunday, May 23, 2010

Subliminal Messages in Food Labels II

On March 14th of this year, we wrote about six food claims that may be easily manipulated by vendors and marketers.

Recently we came across an article on The Daily Green website that listed 5 additional areas of concern that were not mentioned in the article we previously wrote about. These are:

  1. Ingredients - Companies will often break up ingredients by name and not by substance. Ingredients are listed in order, from highest to lowest, of amount present in product. The example given is sugar. No one wants to say their single-most ingredient is sugar. So manufacturers will break it down into things like high-fructose corn syrup, corn syrup, glucose, white grape juice concentrate. These are all different ways to say sugar with an extremely high glycemic index, sugar with a high glycemic index, sugar with a high glycemic index respectively.

  2. Serving Size - Many times what we think are single serving packages actually contain more than one serving. Example soda. While it may be easy to carry a 12oz soda can or 12-20oz plastic bottle, the "Standar Serving Size" is 8oz. So there are 1.5 servings in a soda can and 2.5 in a 20oz bottle. Be sure to multiply nutritional values by that much when thinking of consuming the whole thing.

  3. Omega-3 - There are two ways a product which contains Omega-3 can advertise that it has Omega-3. One is by saying it contains Omgega-3's and another is by indicating that the product can reduce risk of coronary heart disease. To make the health claim the product must contain Omega-3's but must also be low in saturated fats and other risk factors. Be careful... "Omega-3" does not necessarily mean that the product is good for you (or your heart).

  4. 0 Trans Fat - Read the label! Many products that openly advertise "0 Trans Fats" have high amounts (replaced trans fats) of saturated fats. Saturated fats are essentially just as bad.

  5. Free Range Eggs - There is no way to determine if this is true as the government has not regulated this claim for eggs.


Aticle [The Daily Green]: 9 Food Label Lies

1 comment:

  1. I saw this as one of @lizchau's tweets today.

    "Blueberries faked in cereals, muffins, bagels and other food products - Food Investigations" :: http://naturalnews.tv/v.asp?v=7EC06D27B1A945BE85E7DA8483025962

    ReplyDelete