Wholesome. Pure. All Natural. Do these words really mean anything when it comes to food labels? Have you ever gone to the grocery store looking and comparing cereals, breads or salad dressings and then feeling a little fed up, confused and not sure who to believe?
FOOD LABELS LIE. I hate to tell it to you but it’s the truth.
In my free guide on how to read food labels, you’ll learn everything you need to know to go to the grocery store, confidently pull any product off the shelf and within a few seconds cut through all the bull, all the marketing, and determine for REAL if it is a healthy product for you and your family or not. You can get your copy at www.FoodLabelsLie.com
2 Tricks the Food Industry Use:
- The Serving Size Trick: As an example, I will use Monster Drink’s smallest product size which is 8 oz. On the back, it says 2 servings per container. If you had a drink this small, are you going to drink only half of it? Of course not! It doesn’t matter what size you get, you’ll always drink all of it! Food companies know that our intention is to drink the whole thing but for those of us who are smartening up, they know we’re going to put it back on the shelf if the ingredients are atrocious. People want their drinks to be low on calories. Instead of saying that the entire 8 oz of Monster drink has 200 calories, they split that into 2 (the number of servings), making it appear on the back as 100 calories. The same goes for sugar, instead of saying there’s 54 grams of it in one drink, it only appears as 27 grams PER SERVING.
Multiply everything, the calories, sugar and fat by the number of servings indicated. That’s the first trick.
- The Trans Fat Trick: Everybody is concerned about trans fats and if you’re not, you should be. Trans fat is a hydrogenated oil which, even according to the FDA, there is no amount of trans fats that’s safe for us to eat. Having any amount of trans fats in our diet puts us in a higher risk for heart disease and unhealthy triglyceride levels.
“Zero grams of Trans fats per Serving” is a LIE and once you see that phrase on the box, there’s a 100% guarantee that there is some trans fat in that product. According to the FDA food labeling guidelines, any product with less than half a gram of transfat per serving can be rounded off to ZERO. So when you look at the back, you’ll see they’ve just split those servings up to be small enough so that each serving has less than half a gram, hence ZERO GRAMS OF TRANSFAT.
Trick number two: Zero Gram Trans fats on any label means there is Trans fats in it.
These are two big tricks the food industry tries to play on us. Get my short, easy to read, but comprehensive guide here: www.FoodLabelsLie.com so I can send you the mini eBook I’ve written that’s going to teach you exactly how to skip over the lies and cut straight to the truth on your food labels. You’ll be a label reading pro in no time.
What are your favorite food label hacks?