Always check the ingredient list

Amaze Magazine...

Label Lies! Nutritionist & Food Label Expert Jeff Novick Sets us Straight

When searching the grocery aisle for the healthiest products, we are certainly presented with an abundance of choices! To help us make wiser choices, we turned to Nutritionist & Food Label Expert Jeff Novick of the Pritikin Longevity Center & Spa, for the truth behind the label lies!

"Light" Ice Cream

For ice cream and all other foods: Never believe the claims on the front of the box.

What many think are health claims are actually just marketing pitches and advertisements. And government approved claims, like "low-fat" and "light," often don't tell you the whole story. These products may be high in fat as well as sugar, salt, and/or calories. "Light" ice cream, for example, may still pack in 4 to 5 grams of fat per serving. And "light" and "regular" varieties of ice cream may not differ much calorically.

Never evaluate a product based on one item, such as its fat, caholesterol, sugar, carbohydrate, or salt content. Attempting to cash in on the latest diet or nutrition craze, many companies promote their products based on a single item despite other unhealthy aspects. (Remember "fat-free" foods that were full of sugar and calories?) To be truly healthy, a product must pass several criteria.

"99% Fat-Free" Soup

Don't be fooled by claims like "99% fat-free" soup, "93% fat-free" meat, or "2% fat" milk. They're based on percent of weight, not percent of calories. So that can of 99% fat-free soup may actually derive 77% of its calories from fat, or more. Ground meat advertised as "93% fat free" gets in fact about 46% of its calories from fat. And 2% fat milk actually has about 34% of total calories from fat; 1% milk has about 23% calories from fat.

"Whole Grain" Kids' Cereals Like Lucky Charms and Trix

Riding the wave of the "eat more whole grains" recommendation of the newly released 2005 Dietary Guidelines For Americans, food companies are now producing many new whole-grain products, but some, unfortunately, are far from 100% whole grain. Nor are they necessarily healthy foods.

In the cereal aisle, for example, you'll find products like Trix, Golden Grahams, Rice Chex, and Lucky Charms with the words "WHOLE GRAIN" emblazoned on the front of the boxes.

But few of these reformulated cereals have more than 1 gram of fiber per serving, indicating that there's not a whole lot of whole grain in the box. Sure enough, in the ingredient list you'll find refined white flours, often described as "wheat flour" and "enriched flour," in addition to the heavily advertised whole-grain flour.

"Breakfast Candy"

And even if the cereals were in fact 100% whole-grain, many would still not be considered healthful food choices because they're full of other ingredients that are problematic. Lucky Charms, for example, is nearly half-sugar. "With or without whole grains, these cereals are nothing more than breakfast candy," reported the May 05 issue of Nutrition Action, the newsletter of the non-profit health-advocacy group Center for Science in the Public Interest in Washington, D.C.

Similarly, bread products like new 100% Whole Wheat Orowheat bagels do in fact contain only whole grains, but each bagel also has 450 mg of sodium, nearly one-third the total amount of sodium recommended for the day for middle-aged and older individuals by the new 2005 Dietary Guidelines for Americans.

When scouting out healthful, whole-grain products, Always check the ingredient list.

Make sure that any grain is WHOLE grain, such as whole-wheat flour or sprouted whole-grain kernels. Many bread, cereal, and pasta products claim to be whole grain, but the first item or two in the ingredient list is often wheat flour, enriched flour, multi-grain flour, semolina flour, durum flour, unbleached flour, bleached flour, or even spinach flour, many of which sound healthy, but they're all just refined white flours. Further down the list will be whole-wheat flour or bran. Scout out products that contain only whole grains, or, at the very least, list whole grains as the first ingredient.

Because ingredients are listed in descending order of weight, the lower down the label you find refined grains, the better.

"0 Trans Fat" Oreo Cookies - Trans Fat Tricks

As of January 1, 2006, the FDA requires that food packages list the amount of trans fats, also known as partially hydrogenated fats, in the Nutrition Facts section. But as you learned in "Label Reading" class at Pritikin, don't believe anything on the front of the package (such as headlines like "0 Trans Fats!" on Oreo Cookies) and always read the ingredient list.

If the amount of trans fat is less than 0.5 grams per serving, the FDA allows companies to list it as "0" in the Nutrition Facts section. But if in the ingredient list you see "partially hydrogenated" fats or oils, that product does in fact have trans fats, as much as 0.49 grams per serving. If you eat several servings, you could be eating a lot of trans fats.

That's a big problem because trans fats, formed when liquid oils are made into solid fats like margarine, not only raise LDL "bad" cholesterol but also lower HDL "good" cholesterol, increasing the risk of heart disease. Put simply, trans fat is the worse kind of fat there is.

Optimally, steer clear of any product that lists partially hydrogenated fats in the ingredient list. Other bad fats to avoid include saturated animal fat (such as butter, lard, and chicken fat), and saturated vegetable fats (such as coconut oil, palm oil, and palm kernel oil).

"Fat-Free" Pam is actually 100% fat

Pam and other oil sprays claim that each serving has 0 grams of fat. But the fact is: The only ingredient in the can is oil, which is 100% fat.

So how could manufacturers say this product is free of fat? They're sneaky. They posted a ridiculously small serving size – .25 grams. That's 120th of an ounce – or one teensy one-quarter-of-a-second squirt.

There isn't much of anything, oil or otherwise, in 120th of an ounce, which manufacturers love because the FDA states they can "round down" ingredients that are less than half a gram to 0. Hence, the food label says 0 grams of fat. But if you eat multiple servings – if you coat an entire skillet with oil spray – you're tallying up multiple calories, all 100% fat.

Newman's Own Popcorn

Bye, Bye, Trans Fat,
But ...Hello, Palm Oil?!

Palm oil is almost as heart-damaging as the trans fats it replaced.

Responding to the Food and Drug Administration's order to disclose the amount of unhealthy trans fats on food labels by January 2006, many food companies have totally eliminated or cut down on trans fats in their products. But some companies, like Newman's Own, are replacing trans fats with palm oils and other high-in-saturated-fat tropical oils that are almost as heart-damaging as trans fats. Newman's Own popcorn, for example is using palm oil in virtually all of its "Trans Fat Free" microwave popcorns.

Trans Fats – Worst Kind Of Fat

Trans fats are man-made fats that were originally liquid oils but through hydrogenation (adding hydrogen to vegetable oils) turned solid. In ingredient lists on food labels, trans fats are known as "partially hydrogenated fats." Numerous studies are now finding that trans not only raise LDL bad cholesterol but also lower HDL good cholesterol, prompting scientists nationwide to deride them as the worst kind of fat.

Palm Oil – Unhealthy Alternative

But replacing them with palm oil and other tropical oils like coconut oil and palm kernel oil? "This is nuts!" exclaims Jeff Novick, MS, RD, LV/N, Director of Nutrition at the Pritikin Longevity Center & Spa in Aventura, Florida. "All these tropical oils are highly saturated fats. Like butter, cheese, and meat, tropical oils raise LDL cholesterol and clog your arteries with plaque, increasing your risk of a heart attack."

"In fact, tropical oils are a form of saturated fat that is WORSE than butter," emphasizes Jeff. Coconut oil is 92% saturated, making it more saturated than butter, beef tallow, or even lard. Palm oil, though it contain less saturated fat (50%), is full of a type of saturated fat, palmitic acid, which appears to be most conducive to heart disease.

Artery Cloggers

Ironically, in the 1980s and 90s, it was health concerns over tropical oils that helped spur food manufacturers to use trans fats in the first place. "Now we're going BACK to tropical oils?" bemoans Jeff. "We're trading one artery-clogger for another?!"