More Tricks

So if nutrition labels are regulated, that means it’s easy to know if it’s healthy, right? Not exactly. Nutrition labels have ingredients listed with the largest amount first and the last ingredient is the smallest amount added. Here are a couple more ways that companies make things seem healthier than they really are so that they sell their products.

• One trick is combining healthy ingredients so that they can list them first as a blend, but this means they could sneak unhealthy ingredients in the blend too.
• Sometimes they split up types of sugars so they can list them at the bottom. It’s probably still too much sugar in a product.
• Sugar that isn’t sugar – For example: Maltodextrin is a very sweet, highly processed carbohydrate derived from starches like corn, rice, potato or wheat. It’s virtually equivalent to regular table sugar, but doesn’t have to be listed as sugar. It has a glycemic index of 105, whereas table sugar has 64. Products that claim complex carbs or sugar free are often still bad for you.
• Products that claim 0grams (of unhealthy ingredients) may not be true! They are actually allowed .5grams per servings of any ingredient without adding it to the label.
• Enriched wheat flour – We want to consume wheat, but unless it says 100% whole wheat flour, it isn’t healthy for you. White flour comes from wheat so they can say “wheat flour”, but if the bread is white, it’s been stripped and bleached.
• Claiming healthy ingredients on the front, but actually only adding a tiny amount! – if they are listed last, you know the front label is a marketing trick.
• Unrealistic serving sizes – if a product is really unhealthy they will shrink the serving size so that the nutrition label doesn’t look as bad. But 9 times out of 10 we eat more than one serving of a food, especially if it’s a processed one.
• Low calorie and reduced fat foods – these are typically only lower or reduced compared to the companies higher/original full fat product, but it doesn’t make it a healthy product.

It’s not your fault if you don’t know some of these tricks. Companies only care about making money so they will do whatever they can to increase their sales.

Here’s a quick way to evaluate what might not be a whole food. (Think, if God said let there be potatoes, then yup it’s a whole food, but God did not say, “let there be French fries!” Man instead said, hmmmm, potatoes are boring, let’s make em into chips and French fries, so nope, it’s no longer a whole food because over the years man added so many harmful ingredients to those potatoes, and processed them to make chips and fries so that they taste yummy and stay fresh for weeks, that you lose the health benefits of the potato)

OR think, did this food item come from a seed? So sorry, Cheetos are not a whole food ☹

Now that doesn’t mean we can’t have yummy tasting food! The flip side of the beauty of man is that over time we have learned about herbs and spices and different ways to cook foods to change up the taste of whole foods. And there are recipes everywhere that can help you learn healthy ways to try them.