Page 196 - How to Be a Conscious Eater - Making Food Choices That Are Good for You

meant the food itself was really a beet-flavored potato chip,
not a beet chip.
Despite regulations insisting that imagery not be mislead-
ing, the definition of that rule remains rather subjective. Take
strawberry-flavored toaster pastries with that strawberry
pinup on the box. Then you see that actual strawberries are
MIA on the ingredients list. The manufacturer instead essen-
tially made a composite likeness through some pureed apple,
Red 40 dye (which contains cancerous compounds, mind you),
and artificial strawberry flavor. Nothing against apples, but
you probably thought you were diversifying your fruit intake
or getting a more premium ingredient in your product.

Emphasizing certain information to make you overlook other informa-
tion: Sometimes a label on the front will say “0 grams trans
fat,” but the product actually packs on the saturated fat. Ditto
for a product having a product having “No added sugar” while
soaring in sodium. This is another reason to routinely flip the
product over to check the Nutrition Facts panel.
Another issue may be that the numbers on the front are
large, yet it’s hard to make out the Percent Daily Value. Like the
selectiveness of the facts themselves, this difference from the
Nutrition Facts panel also appears to be by design. For instance,
500 mg potassium may sound high, but it’s only 14 percent of
your Daily Value. Five grams of saturated fat may sound low,
but it’s 25 percent of your Daily Value, which is actually a lot
when tucked into a small amount of food.

USING WORDS THAT ARE TECHNICALLY
ALLOWED BUT HAVE LITTLE MEANING
(or a meaning that ’ s not what most of us would expect)
“Reduced”: This means the product contains 25 percent less of
something—usually sodium or fat—than the original version
of that product. It does not mean the amount of that substance

Stuff that Comes from Factories 185

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