You’re a student at college and you think you’re clever, right? But, are you clever enough to see through the smoke and mirrors used by food manufacturers and retailers, to confuse us when choosing the foods we believe are best for us?
Most of us tend to assume brown bread is healthier because its brown. However, the variations in fibre and salt content in different brown breads is huge. A loaf labelled ‘high fibre’ must contain at least 6g of fibre per 100g. A loaf claiming to be ‘a source of fibre’ only needs to contain 3g of fibre per 100g.
Many yoghurts are labelled as ‘low fat’ and will have less than 3g of fat per 100g. However, some low fat products can contain as many as nine teaspoons of sugar.
Reading catchy slogans on food packing isn’t enough. To understand whats really going into our food we need to read the nutritional tables, also printed on food packaging, but usually on the reverse, out of sight.
Other fun facts exist, if you dig deep enough. M&S sells 11,000 tons of Lochmuir salmon every year. However Lochmuir doesn’t appear on any atlas, nor on Google maps. Lochmuir is only a brand name for fish sourced from several fish farms across Scotland. The Willow Farm brand used by Tesco is also fictional. In fact Tesco’s chicken is sourced from around the U.K. Many foods labelled as fruit flavoured, only contain artificial flavourings. Likewise, straplines like farmhouse, traditional, fresh and natural are meaningless and their use is unregulated. Even guaranteed Irish, need only be 50% Irish.
More consumer friendly is the traffic light system, a red, amber and green colour code to indicate levels of fat, sugar, salt and saturates in food. However, the food industry has spent more than €1bn to try to kill the traffic light system. In the interests of our health, or in the interests of their balance sheets? Recently the EU legislated to adopt a more complicated guideline daily amount (GDA) system of representing product nutrition, clearly dismissing the axiom, keep it simple stupid.
Do you bother to read food labels? What fun facts have you discovered?
Image: Wikimedia: Edward/Gallery
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