You have decided to eat healthy and walk into a supermarket to pick up foods you think are good for you. The nutrition label of every food you pick off the shelf is subjected to your eagle eye as you read it with manic concentration, absorbing every letter and number as you troll past the listing of sugars, carbs, fats, vitamins, minerals and calories until you feel your head swimming.
But you know this level of attention paid to labels is worth it as it prevents you from turning your gut and stomach into dumping grounds for preservatives and excess fat, salt and sugar. But are you interpreting the information correctly?
Reading food lables is almost an art today thanks to the sheer abundance of detail on the label. But what many of us do not realise is that food manufacturers often exploit our lack of knowledge about nutrition. If a label screams ‘Fat free!’, that’s music to your ears and you grab it off the shelf. But have you paid attention to the rest of the ingredients of that packaged food? What lurks in there to compensate for fat’s absence?
For example, take transfat. US guidleines state that if the transfat content in a food is less than 0.5 grams, it need can be listed on the label as zero. But zero trans-fat on the food label does not mean zero trans-fat in the food - that food would have about 0.5 gms at th very least and if you eat two or more servings of it, you will be ruining your diet.
Sakina Mustansir, dietician, Prime Medical Centre, Dubai, warns about other tricks that manufacturers play on you. “Sugar has many names,” she points out. “One trick is to distribute sugars so that they do not appear in the top three in the list. The manufacturer may use a combination of sucrose, high-fructose syrup, corn syrup, brown sugar, dextrose to make sure none of them are in large enough quantities to be on the top of the ingredient list,” she says. That lulls you into believing that this food has very little sugar. If you are a diabetic, this trick will tip you into the danger zone.
The only way to deconstruct a food label to is be armed with facts and knowledge of how nutrition works.
