Food myths and Food Lies
Watch out for diet food lies
You just 'know' that anything that's diet must be better for you - right? You just know that's what you should be eating - right? Well I'm not so sure. The fat and sugar mythMost low calorie products are just another calorie con. Yet sales of products like low-fat and sugar-free items have been growing exponentially, mainly in highly processed snack type foods.With low-fat or fat-free products, while manufacturers reduce the fat, they bump up the sugar in order to enhance the flavour lost by removing the fat. On the flip side, for sugar-free products, fat is usually added to make up the flavour lost by removing the sugar. This for me, has been a really good reason to ditch diets and their related food-stuffs that I can't trust. Just because it has 'low fat' or 'sugar-free' emblazoned on the packaging does not make it low in calories. Beware of this misleading packaging. Besides the way reporting of food contents go, it's all too easy to hide just how much or what kinds of fats and sugars are in food.
Click here to read more about the way diet-foods con us. The health food mythJust because something is marketed as a ‘health food’ doesn’t necessarily mean it is. Don’t take what diet food manufacturers say as gospel. Here’s a why.
In 2006, Australian health authorities undertook the first serious analysis of nutrition labels and found that of the over 70 products tested, 84% of labels were incorrect on at least one nutrient.
Incorrect labelling promotes food lies big time! How are we as consumers meant to trust what we see when research like this show us just how many food lies even 'official' labels contain. • Products claiming to be low in sodium or fat were more likely to have incorrect information. Of the low-fat of low-calorie products - 19% exceeded the fat content listed, and two-thirds had more calories than listed. • One-third exceeded the sugar content listed. One product (an unnamed brand of chips) had a trans-fat level that was 13 times higher than listed! Another product (also unnamed) had 3 times as many calories as listed. So if you bought into the label you were taken in hook, line and sinker by food lies and information that intentionally perpetuates food myths. But don't feel alone - it's easy to think that if something is in writing, it's accurate.
Here's REAL food
The 'all fat is bad' mythIn the past, as if the ever-changing landscape of what is good and what is bad, the American Heart Association (AHA) guidelines called for no more than 30% fat in food. However that was revisted in the 2000's - now their isn't a restriction on how much fat, the guideline instead is to avoid trans fats.However, we certainly haven't seen that reflected in the number of low fat, no fat products on our shelves. We need fat in both our food and our bodies.
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