Food manufactures and the food marketing industry are in
business of enticing you into buying their products.
They will use jargon to
make you think their products are good for you. For example, a food might be
fat-free, but the rest of the product might consist of ingredients that are bad
for you.
Look at the back of the product. The front contains the marketing; the
back (the label) contains the facts. Food labels are confusing for a lot of people. I know that labels can be tricky, but the label is where you will learn which products
are good for you and which contain ingredients you should avoid. You should be concerned with saturated and trans fats, syrups and added sugar.
Reading the
labels arms you with information to make smart choices about what you eat.
Yes, reading nutrition labels can help you make wise food choices, but understanding a nutrition label requires that you look beyond the fancy claims on the front of the box. If you know how to read between the lines of the marketing spin, you can know how to make the most nutritious choices without having to read the fine print. By law, food labels must be truthful. But manufactures can pick and choose which facts to highlight and spin. As a consumer, your best option is to disregard the claims on the front of the package because, while they may be true, it may not tell you the whole story.
ReplyDeleteIt's funny you would say this, because I was shopping for a friend and they wanted some coffee creamer. Well, I stopped to look at the back of the bottles, and not one of them listed "cream" on the back! Most of them didn't even list "milk" or "lactose."
ReplyDeleteI thought, "What's in coffee creamer if not milk or cream?" None of them said they were for lactose-intolerant people. I could not figure out what 90% of the ingredients actually were, but I know for sure that the hydrolized palm oil or something like that is really bad for you. I ended up getting half-and-half! At least I knew what was in it!
This is why I drink tea. No, not really, but my gosh - this is ridiculous.
This is why it's important to read labels. While the verbiage on the front is designed to make you want to buy (and so are the pictures, by the way), the labels on the back actually tell you what is in the package. While the food industry pushed hard to keep the labeling requirements from becoming a reality, now that they're here, we're learning a lot more about what we're ingesting.
ReplyDeleteI have to say that it's always somewhat of a shock whenever I see yet another kids' cereal coming out that's completely made of sugar. There may be a little bit of dietary fiber in them, but other than that, they're mostly made of empty carbs (sugar but no fiber).
The human body hasn't changed much since the cave man days, but the choices sure have. I would just advise using your common sense, reading the labels, and asking yourself if that's really what you want to put into your body.
I think labels are very useful in helping us make healthy choices.
ReplyDeleteI would have to say that it's a shame we even require labeling! I don't have anything against it, but I think that people have voluntarily ignored their gut-level instincts that tell them, "There can't be anything beneficial about eating this item!"
ReplyDeleteFor as long as you can remember, you've been eating junk food and candy. And deep inside, for as long as you remember, you've known that there is nothing healthy about those two choices. Granted, you might not have known that they actually put sugar in the hamburger buns! But long before labeling came into play, you probably had a gut level feeling of guilt or some other negative feeling when you got ready to eat a whole pie or a ton of 3-chocolate fudge.
When "clean eating" came out, I'm sure it resonated with a lot of people as the sensible thing to do, but they just turned away from it. Maybe the habit was too strong to break.
So I totally agree with the labeling, because I think it helps people put the last nail in the coffin of their rationalizations.
Are they really confusing?
ReplyDeleteI believe labelling is a must for every item that upsells. Labelling makes 80% of sales than talking. However when the labelling is not structured appropriately on the product, it losses its objectives thereby confusing its subjects and defeating its purposes.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that these days, it can be next to impossible to know what we’re actually eating.
ReplyDelete