The secret to reading the ingredients: What’s really in your food?
WHEN it comes to food labels, there’s more than meets the eye.
Supermarket shelves are filled with rows and rows of products all screaming their own nutritional praises — even the most health-conscious shopper can become stumped.
Here’s what you should zero in on.
1. Health Halo Effect:
Food manufacturers know many of us are tempted by trendy buzzwords such as natural, organic, gluten-free or low-fat. The thing is, foods that carry these labels often have ingredients you don’t want or have very little nutritional value. Known as the “health halo” effect, which tends to lead people to over-estimate the overall healthfulness of a food based on one narrow attribute.
What’s more, health halos are proven to cause people to eat more food than they intended. Sorry, but potato crisps that have less saturated fat are still chips for goodness sakes.
Tip: Use your label-reading prowess; ignore front-of-package claims and read the fine print.
2. Short and sweet.
When it comes to packaged food, a short ingredient list has become something to brag about. In other words, a long ingredients list usually means the product is highly processed. The order of ingredients matters, too. All ingredients must be listed in descending order by weight, including water, so that means the first ingredient is the most abundant in the product.
Tip: Make it a rule: If you can’t pronounce the word, don’t eat it.
3. Portions vs. servings.
Yes, there is a big difference. A portion is the amount of food that you choose to eat for a meal or snack. A serving is a measured amount of food or drink, such as one slice of bread or one cup of milk.
The problem is that many manufacturers vary in the number of serving size they place on the package and many foods that come as a single portion actually contain multiple servings. Some of the biggest offenders are sugar-sweetened beverages, flavoured milk and yoghurts, which contain multiple servings even though they’re sold as “individual” serves.
Tip: Always check the serving size and the nutrition information per serving of food, and compare it to how much you are actually consuming. You may be surprised to find you are eating more than you should be.
4. Incognito Ingredients.
You’ll be surprised to find the many different names to disguise words like ‘fat’, ‘sugar’ or ‘salt’ among the other ingredients so that they do not appear near the top of the ingredients list. Add together the incognito ingredients to see how much sugar, salt and fat you are actually consuming. Here is a list of some of their aliases.
Fat: beef fat, butter, shortening, coconut, palm oil, copha, cream, dripping, lard, mayonnaise, sour cream, vegetable oils and fats, hydrogenated oils, full cream milk powder, egg or mono/di/triglycerides.
Sugar: brown sugar, corn syrup, dextrose, disaccharides, fructose, glucose, golden syrup, honey, fruit juice concentrate, fruit syrup, lactose, malt, maltose, mannitol, maple syrup, molasses, monosaccharides, raw sugar, sorbitol or xylitol.
Salt: baking powder, celery salt, garlic salt, sodium, meat or yeast extract, onion salt, MSG, rock salt, sea salt, sodium bicarbonate, sodium metabisulphite, sodium nitrate, nitrate or stock cubes.
5. Adding up additives
Like it or not, food additives are part of packaged food, with more than 300 additives approved for use in Australia. They are listed as either colours, preservatives, antioxidants, artificial sweeteners, flavour enhancers, emulsifiers, stabilisers and thickeners. Whether they are safe or not has long been controversial. For a full list of additives and what they do, click here
Tip: If you are unsure whether or not a product contains an additive, check the ingredients.
Kathleen Alleaume is a nutritionist, author and founder of The Right Balancewww.therightbalance.com.au
Source: News Limited, Kathleen Alleaume, 22nd August 2015
Originally published as: The secret to reading the ingredients: What’s really in your food?
