The truth about Food Hype - Misleading food packaging!

There are a myriad of foods on the high street that are marketed towards those wanting to lose weight or eat a low fat diet. But how do you know that they are any good for you? How do you know that the product will help you lose weight, how do you know it is low in fat or in calories? Because it says so on the packet? Because it says “Low Fat”? Because you bought it at a health shop? Because there has just been a news release about one of the ingredients being a “superfood” ? Unfortunately the answer to all of these questions is no.

I recently researched some of the claims made by food manufacturers for a health show,   "Health in Mind, episode 1” for local TV producer Portsmouth Live. What I found was that some of the products aimed at people wanting a healthy lifestyle or those wanting to lose weight were on the whole, not that much different to regular products in fat or carbohydrate content. The big problem is of course that we often don’t check the label to see what is really going on; instead we buy blindly into the label and the other cleverly placed information on the front.

The products I looked at were Mc Vities Go Ahead Fruit Crunch bars, Weight Watchers Caramel Cake Bars which I compared to a regular Mr Kipling Jam Tart.

As you can see, per 100 grams, fat content is the same for all of them to within a gram, sugar is very high in the Go Ahead bar and also, importantly, saturated fat is higher in both the Go Ahead product and the Weight Watchers product than in the humble jam tart.

Next I had managed to find another regular product, strangely enough, Mr Kipling again, this time French Fancies, that was LOWER in fat than the Go Ahead bar and yet again it is lower in saturated fat than the Go Ahead product which is deliberately marketed towards those wanting healthy snacks.

What was really disturbing was that when I went out onto the street and interviewed people to see what they thought of these products, they thought that the Weight Watchers product and the Go Ahead one had less fat or less sugar because of the branding and the rather over emphasised panel on the front drawing your attention to the fact that each bar has 2.6grams of fat and 96 calories. This information is already on the back of the packet so why are they duplicating it? Quite simply by putting it on the front in large letters they are drawing our attention to the figures which do on the face of it look small. Indeed, 2.6 grams isn’t a lot of fat and 96 calories isn’t a lot of calories. This is very misleading since per 100 grams there is only three calories difference between the products! The Go Ahead products and the Weight Watchers products are smaller and that is the only reason there are less calories in them!

The other question is of course, are you going to stop at one? We tend to give ourselves permission to eat more because we have told our self that the product is a healthier option, lower fat or lower calorie. Experiments show that when people perceive a product to be “low fat or low calorie” they eat more of it. In fact a recent piece of research in America showed that a group of people given low fat cookies ate a whopping 40% more than the group given the regular ones.

So what is the answer? We need to stop buying in to the food manufacturers’ hype. They want to sell us products and if that means embellishing the truth or just plain lying then they will do it. The very best foods come with no health claims and as nature intended. There really is no substitute for fresh healthy food, fresh fruit, vegetables and nuts can all be used to replace these fake healthy products. If you want a treat, have a treat but without kidding yourself that it is some how good for you.