Food for Thought

If you think you can always trust the FDA to tell you how many calories you're consuming in some of your favorite prodcuts, think again. Here are a couple tid-bits I learned from Jillian Michaels' Maximize Your Life tour. This is not meant to bash any of these products, but rather to learn tricks that companies are legally allowed to use to better market their product....but negatively affect your waistline.

Take, "I Can't Belive it's Not Butter" spray for instance. (Personally, I love to use this product with corn-on-the-cob. Spray the butter with one hand while you spin the corn with the other. Genius.) It says zero calories, and why would you think to question that? Here's why you should: if a serving size of any food/drink has less than 1 calorie, they are allowed to round down on the nutrition label. One serving size of this butter spray is 1 1/4 spray, which has 0.9 calories. So, the FDA allows them to call it zero. Consider that if you spray your baked potato 10 times, that's basically 10 calories--pretty insignificant, but Jillian says the entire bottle has something like 1,200 calories! Much different than the "zero" on the label.

This one is pretty obvious, but it's something I hadn't really thought about until Jillian said it. We all know that nutrition labels list the ingredients in the order of highest amount. On any given granola bar nutrition label, you'll see that the main ingredients are things like oats, flour, etc. Seems like actual, real food, huh? But you might also see names like dextrose, fructose, sucralose or any other "-ose" word. New flash: these are all names for SUGAR. So, why do they include 4 different kinds of sugar in one product? Because if they only used one, it would be listed as the MAIN ingredient. But, when they use smaller amounts of different kinds of sugar, the main ingredients are still allowed to be listed as things like oats. Sneaky.... If granola bars are one of your staple foods, you're better off making them yourself. Try this homemade granola bar recipe.