The Food Label Deception Game

It's great that we live in a society where the main suppliers of our food have a consistent track record of trying to trick us into eating unhealthy and toxic stuff just so they can make a lot of money. Until there's some sort of revolution, in consciousness or otherwise, that's the situation we are stuck with however. So at least recognize the biggest deceptions so you don't get taken in by them.

Sugar is one of the biggest points of manipulation in food labeling. Manufacturers like to use a combination of sweeteners, all of which act the same on your body as sugar but have different names. High fructose corn syrup, corn syrup solids, sucrose, dextrose, evaporated sugar cane, cane sugar, and evaporated cane juice (which is refined sugar and not actual nutritious cane juice) are all the same thing - a fast-acting sugar that is devoid of nutrients - but they can be present in the same product and listed as separate ingredients under all of those names and more. Ingredients have to be listed with the highest concentrations first according to FDA regulations, so spacing them out in this way lets them be shifted further down the list and thus appear to be present in lower quantities. The safest bet is to look for the overall gram amount of sugar per serving, where the producers are hoping you won't know how much sugar per sitting is potentially harmful.

A related trick is manipulating the portion sizes of foods and drinks to something ridiculously small (yet still legal under FDA regulations), so that the ingredient amounts listed appear to be much lower for the whole product than they actually are. Take a standard single serve bottle of soda, which one would assume is listed as one serving since people usually drink the whole bottle at a sitting - but the serving size is listed at 2, sometimes 2.5 servings per bottle!

The serving size trick ties into a related trick regarding trans fats. Trans fats have been all over the news for the past couple of years, with some localities outright banning them. In the wake of all this negative press, it's good business to proudly display a "Zero Trans Fat!" or "Made Without Trans Fat!" label on the packaging of a food product or a drink. Aside from the fact that many of these products never contained trans fat to begin with, trans fat only has to be reported (again under FDA regulations) if the amount in a single serving totals greater than 0.5 grams. Half a gram of trans fat isn't enough to really do anything to your body, but if you're taking in single servings all day that you think are free of trans fat, it can add up. At the very least, it is disingenuous and shows how sorry the present relationship is between these businesses and their customers.

Fiber is another point of contention. Fiber is good for you and known to lower cholestorol. However, not all fibers are equal. Whole grain fiber, for example, is not the same as chicory root, the latter of which provides less nutritional and cholestorol lowing benefit, but of course is much cheaper for food producers to use.

There's also a lot of trickery regarding the words "organic" and "natural" to look out for. Many corporate and big agribusiness companies, who do nothing but produce toxic and unhealthy foods, have spun off "organic" and "healthy" brand names, with only the minimal required indication on the packaging that these brands are connected to the parent company. Coca-Cola owns Odwalla, but you'd never know from looking at the packaging (unless you carefully read all the smallest print), as the bottle tries to look as little like a standard Coke soda product as possible. Kraft's Yuban brand of coffee offers an "organic" variety now with the tagline "Make A Difference." But the Kraft logo is only found in tiny form above the bar code on the back of the cans, the coffee is only required by the FDA to be 30% organic (mixed with up to 70% regular coffee) to be certified as such, and the "Make A Difference" line implies Fair Trade practices when none at all are guaranteed. Cadbury owns Nantucket Nectars and Green & Black's Chocolate, General Mills has four organic brands with names like Muir Glen, Unilever owns Ben and Jerry's Organic, Kellogg owns Kashi, and both Heinz and Cargill have an investment in a frightening amount of small, supposedly "indie" organic and natural brands.

Greenerchoices.org, a branch of the non-profit arm of Consumer Reports, has published some interesting findings regarding "natural" branding. Current "free range" and "free roaming" requirements, for example, can be met with as little as a few minutes of outdoor access to the animals per day. "Free range" can be met as a requirement by also having the animals packed in a large warehouse or tent facility, just so long as they are not in cages. There is also little to no established standards or enforcement on use of the term "natural" on packaging. Only on meat and poultry products does the term insure that the product has no artificial ingredients, colors or preservatives. A famous flap in recent years over this point was made with regards to 7-Up, when they started their present "100% Natural" ad campaign, which they maintain to this day. Of course, 7-Up is flavored largely with fructose corn syrup, which is hardly a naturally occurring ingredient. However, the FDA ruled in favor of the pop people, deciding that packaging can claim that corn syrup and items synthesized from corn can be claimed to be "natural."

Then there's flour. There's lots of technicalities by which items partially made with white flour can be listed as "wheat." The key words to look for are "unbleached" or "enriched", which means it is almost guaranteed to be white flour. The term "whole weat" is one of the few the FDA is strong on; if the packaging says that, it is genuine whole wheat flour. "Wheat bread" that doesn't have the "whole wheat" designation is likely just white bread with a little wheat thrown in and a lot of brown food coloring to change the appearance.