Posted by Savneet Singh on Sep.21, 2010

ⓒ iStockPhoto - alxpin

Processed food makes up a fair to large portion of daily diets. With a little awareness, you can identify the products those are high in saturated fats, trans fats, salt, sugar and other unhealthy ingredietns. Read the small print carefully to find out the less pleasant aspect of the food such as mechanically recovered meat (MRM) and indiscriminate use of additives.

Food labels may not tell the whole story. A can of the apple juice with a mouth-watering picture on the carton may carry in small print, “Only 10% real juice” and the remainder may be sugar, water and additives for coloring and flavoring, which is legal, but not very good for you. Strawberry yogurt or a strawberry shake may contain no strawberry,  only the artificial flavor. Similarly, meat in inexpensive “pork” sausages and other meat products, such as hamburgers, can include mechanically recovered meat (MRM) which is a kind of slurry removed by machine from a carcass after all the other meat has been removed. “Meat” can also include rind, skin, sinew and gristle.

There is another thing, the main ingredient that you may be looking for in the product may actually be quiet small. You may be surprised to read beef as one of the ingredient in chicken bouillon. Or you are trying to go vegetarian but unaware that yogurt has gelatin which is made from beef bone.

Similarly words like “ farm fresh” traditional and “natural” have a very little meaning. Take the case of eggs. The so-called farm fresh eggs are usually battery eggs. “No added sugar” banners may be misleading as those products contain high amount of other similar sweetener such as syrup, honey or concentrated fruit juice. Many of the products you buy are high in salt. The cereals and bread, especially. It is difficult to find how much salt is in there but law limits for sodium is not more than 480mg of sodium per serving.

There are anomalies regarding the fat content in the food we buy, like the 5% fat in french fries, which indicates 5 g fat per 100 g of food. This doesn’t mean that the fries contain only 5% of the total calories as fat. The reduced fat cheese may be “15% fat only” but working out the fat content on the only sensible basis - as a percentage of total calories - in fact it contains 52% of its calories as fat. You might have seen products with ”high fiber content”. The food may have high fiber content because of added bran which in turn inhibit the absorption of iron and other minerals. So, it is better to have fiber in its natural form from vegetables and legumes. Low calorie content is a high selling point for many food products for weight watchers. A reduced calorie product must have 75% or less energy than the similar product for which no calorie claim has been made.

The point here is not that before buying or eating you use calculator to find out what is the amount of fat or other things you are taking but to look at some hidden things behind.

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Posted under Food Facts, Reading Labels.