Perhaps you’ve noticed that few things are more confusing than reading food labels. Let me be perfectly upfront, the real world is absolutely loaded with confusing and false marketing claims about the food you buy.
Who wouldn’t want to throw up their hands after a mere 5 minutes of trying to sift through such labels as “all-natural,” “organic,” “low-fat,” “reduced-fat,” “fortified with omega-3s”, “ low sodium”, “reduced sodium,” and this list goes on. That’s before we even get to the “nutrition facts” label, which is only mildly useful and highly misleading.
Food marketers depend on the fact that most shoppers have very little time to evaluate a product before deciding whether to throw it into their shopping cart. We really don’t understand what “healthy” “reduced fat” or “all natural” mean, but we figure they’ve got to be good, otherwise why would the manufacturer list it on the front of the package.
Look, marketing food isn’t any different from marketing any other product other than the regulations are a little more complex. In fact some claims are just outright useless. For instance, “Natural” is a term that’s only regulated by the government for meats and poultry yet it’s slapped on many of our processed foods from breads and cereals to YES even soda.
Other terms—like “fortified” or “enriched”—make it sound as if the product is loaded with vitamins, but all these terms really mean is that it has 10 percent of the recommended amount per serving, an amount that is essentially meaningless since the recommended value is insignificant to begin with.
Food-labeling manipulation comes in several various forms. So what’s really important to know when reading labels? I’ve identified 4 categories that labeling manipulation will most likely fall under. Once you become good at identifying these, the rest of the label will become obviously meaningless.
1. Serving Size Manipulation
Big Food can include up to .5 grams of trans-fats and still be allowed to say zero. But the problem is that a true serving size will contain a heck of a lot more than that legal .5 grams. So what do they do to combat this? They make the serving size smaller.
By the way, manufacturers do the same thing with sugar. Anything less than ½ gram per serving is considered “sugar-free,” but trust me, by the time you’ve consumed even a reasonable portion of the food, you’ve consumed more sugar than you want to.
This may sound like it’s not a big deal, but it is. Some “so called” heart healthy margarines that played the trans-fat trick contained .49 grams per “pat,” but the pat sizes were ridiculously small. Anyone adding a reasonable amount of this so called “healthy” margarine to various foods during the course of a day could easily wind up scarfing down 3–5 grams of trans-fats, just from the margarine. Remember, the ideal amount of trans-fat consumption for human beings is zero!
Manufacturers have been doing this for a long time with calories. Next time you pick up a single serving bottle of orange juice, soda, or one of those nice prepackaged giant cookies, take a look at the label. If all you glance at is “calories” you might think, “Hey this isn’t so bad!”
But when you look at the fine print you’ll see its “calories per serving,” and when you investigate further the number of servings per package you may in fact find that that lovely low-calorie cookie that “only has 90 calories” is actually considered to be four servings. A single serving box of orange juice often turns out to be 2.5 servings. I’ve seen regular old muffins from the bakery that, when examining the label, turns out to be three servings.
Manufacturers often play the calorie system in reverse as well. A loaf of bread that claims to have “25% fewer calories per slice” may actually be sliced 25 percent thinner than the regular bread. What’s more, the low-calorie claim may allow the manufacturers to sell it for a higher price. Even coffee creamers, for example, may contain 30–40 percent fat, but by defining the “serving size” as a teaspoon, manufacturers can round off the fat to zero, even though one teaspoon of creamer in a cup of coffee would barely change the color.
This kind of thing is standard operating procedure in the world of food marketing. It fools everyone—except it won’t fool you again now that you know what to look for.
2. Ingredient Thinning
The stunning ability manufacturers have to hide what’s really happening with your food didn’t start yesterday. For a long time it’s been widely known that the regulations require that food labels list the ingredients in descending order of predominance according to weight. That means that the heaviest is first, the lightest is last, and so on.
So if a manufacturer doesn’t want the public to know that the most prominent ingredient in a processed product is sugar, what do they do?
They use a dozen different kinds of sweetener. All of them are basically sugar, but by using so many different forms, none of them are predominant so they can list them much further down the list. For example: barley malt syrup, corn sweetener, corn syrup, dehydrated cane juice, dextrose, fruit juice concentrate, high-fructose corn syrup, invert sugar, maltodextrin, malt syrup, raw sugar, rice syrup, sucrose and turbinado sugar all affect your blood sugar just like table sugar does, but by using a combination of them manufacturers can easily disguise the fact that sugar is the main ingredient by weight.
Though disguised sugars may be the worst example of this practice, manufacturers also use it all the time with things like salt, yeast extract, soy sauce, and bad fats.
3. Beware of Fake Products
Manufacturers will often capitalize on name recognition to fool you into buying their products. Blueberries, for example, are well known to be a terrifically healthy food loaded with antioxidants, but some big brand food companies that offer blueberry cereals, muffins, pastries and bars have been caught “faking” the blueberries by creating them out of artificial colors, partially-hydrogenated oils and high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS).
Brand-name-food companies are now selling things like “guacamole dip” that contains no avocado! Instead, they’re made with hydrogenated soybean oil and artificial coloring. Yet unknowing consumers keep buying these products, thinking they’re getting avocado dip when, in reality, they’re buying green-colored, palate pleasing dietary poison.
4. Ingredient Padding
Padding is when food manufacturers take an ingredient—like omega-3s—and fortify their product with it so we instinctively presume it’s healthy.
This trick is called ingredient padding or label padding. It’s commonly used by processed food manufacturers who want to jump on the health-food bandwagon without actually producing healthy foods.
The amount of the “healthy” ingredient that manufacturers add to their food is so miniscule its claims are meaningless. Yet they are legally able to say the product contains the ingredient in question, and they make it very evident by bolding it across the front of their packaging.
Some of the most popular add-ons for this kind of deception include omega-3s, L-carnitine (believed to have the ability to increase fat-burning), gingko (for memory), ginseng (for energy) and acai berry (promoted for everything from weight loss to anti-aging).
Adding a tiny—albeit meaningless—amount of a healthy ingredient to a food wouldn’t be so bad if the food was good to begin with. Problem is these “healthy” ingredients with the glowing reputation are usually added to foods that are basically junk. Since most people don’t have the time to go through and carefully analyze labels, they make split-second decisions based on what stands out the most.
