Blog

Food is not a bad thing, but the way the food industry portrays their products you’d think you were their enemy. They don’t care if you are healthy or if you make good food choices, they’re in it for the profit. The more they can appeal to consumers, the more money they make. Over at Texas Lap Band Talk, they have put together a list of 5 things that the food industry does not want to you to know.

1. Low fat does not mean low calorie
While low fat or reduced fat products can be a helpful part of a healthy diet, food companies often add sweeteners to lower fat foods to make up for the taste lost by removing the fat. My favorite example is reduced fat peanut butter. The calories in peanut butter come mostly from fat so you would think a 30% reduction in fat would make for a lower calorie PB, right? Read the labels–most reduced fat PBs have exactly the same calories as their full fat brothers because there is a ton of added sugar or corn syrup added instead.

2. Low calorie does not mean unlimited quantity
Again, while low calorie foods can and should be an important part of your weight loss program, try to avoid the trap of eating more of something just because the individual portion has fewer calories. For example, reduced calorie cookies are low calorie if you eat two…. if you eat 20 because they’re “low cal” you’ll still end up with an extra pound or two.

3. 100 calorie packs are kind of a rip-off
The food companies often charge extra for giving you a few small servings of something, increasing their profit per unit sold. It’s almost as easy – and a lot cheaper – to buy a little food scale for the kitchen and measure out 100 calorie portions of snacks into the little 1/2 size sandwich bags that are sold at Wal-Mart. That way you can have exactly the food you want in a pre-measured portion and you won’t break the bank doing it.

4. Low carb is mainly for the Atkins diet
While it is true that a high carbohydrate diet will cause you to gain weight (because the carbs just get broken down to sugar in your body then get stored as fat), a food that is “low carb” is not necessarily healthy or low calorie. Low carb foods gained in popularity during the Atkins diet craze, but unless you’re following a strict 20g carb/day diet to send you into ketosis, then low carb versions of certain foods are usually sabotage (higher in fat and at least as much if not more calories than your usual version).

5. Read the nutritional labels not the packaging
The FDA does impose some rules as to what the food companies can print on their labels, but there is an enormous amount of deception that goes on in how things are worded or presented. Things that are “reduced calorie” just have to be a certain percentage less than their regular counterparts. This does not mean they’re low-calorie in general. If a scoop of chocolate covered chocolate ice-cream has 500 calories per scoop, the reduced calorie version may have 400 calories which is still ginormous!! You’ve got to become a nutritional label reader to see past their tricks and get to the truth.

via noscales.com