Healthy Bytes

Looking at ALL the ingredients

Read time: 238 words, about 2 minutes

How do you decide what to buy at the grocery store?

For quite a few years now health claims have been a focal point of food advertising. When we went on that fat is bad kick, the shelves were adorned with low fat this, low fat that. It even gave rise to an entire product line.

Next came the no/low carb.

Now we’re moving into the no trans-fats.

There’s one thing you need to keep in mind…
Food product manufacturers are in business.
If they don’t make a profit, they’ll go out of business.
Part of the profit equation is sales.
The goal of advertising and marketing is to increase sales.

In food as in life, rarely is all or nothing true.
Thus, a food product can be good in some ways, but not good in other ways.
For example, you could buy some trans-fat free cookies…
but they may be loaded with high fructose corn syrup and sugar.

An east coast grocery chain – Hannaford – has implemented a rating system for food called “Guiding Stars”.

They use an algorithm which “evaluates a 100-calorie serving of each product using only the information that is available on the “nutrition facts” panel and the ingredients list. A product receives credit for vitamins, minerals, dietary fiber and whole grains, but is docked points for trans fat, saturated fat, cholesterol, added salt and added sugar.”

Interesting concept… taking ALL the ingredients into account.

This entry was posted on Thu, 9.Nov.2006 at 8:12 am and is filed under Nutrition. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.