Vegetables of Mass Destruction - Label Reading
Sun Jul 08, 2007 at 03:27:43 PM PDT
There were a few articles I saw online a couple of weeks ago that I want to discuss briefly.
The first is Yahoo!'s advice for satisfying cravings. The second exposes lies on food labels. We're talking big, significant lies - like lying about the number of calories or fat grams.
The two of these together just illustrate (to me) how much we as a society are totally missing the point. Unfortunately, there's no way to cheat our way out of eating healthy foods if we want to be healthy. AND, done right, the h ealthy stuff is delicious and enjoyable (and sometimes even affordable and convenient, too).
First, here's a taste of the Yahoo! article:
IF ONLY A DOUGHNUT WILL DO
GO FOR: Entenmann's Softee Plain Donut Singles
WHY: We almost fell for Krispy Kreme's Whole Wheat Glazed, which at 180 calories appear to be one of the skinniest, healthiest options sold individually. The bummer: Hidden inside are 3.5 grams of scary trans fats. All Entenmann's doughnuts, on the other hand, are trans fats free, though for mysterious reasons the "singles" come two to a pack -- so share one with a friend and you'll only eat 170 calories each.
Other recommendations are:
- Chocolate: Hershey's Antioxidant Milk Chocolate OR Dove Dark Chocolate Singles (1.3 oz. bars)
- Ice cream: Blue Bunny Personals Double Strawberry Light OR a small cone at Dairy Queen
- Cookies: Nabisco 100% Whole Grain Newtons Minis
- Pie: A slice of pumpkin OR blueberry
- Chips: A 1 1/8 oz. bag of Baked Lays
On the good side, they are paying attention to trans fat. On the other hand, they are telling people to replace processed food cravings with less unhealthy processed food.
In the case of chocolate, the advice I've heard from one of my favorite experts (Steven Pratt, MD) is to eat chocolate with 70% or more cacao content so you can get all of the antioxidants without so much freaking sugar. Does the Hershey or Dove Yahoo! recommends do the trick? I have no idea. The Hershey option is milk chocolate, which practically guarantees you're not getting 70%+ cacao.
If you're into fair trade and organic chocolate, the best I've found so far is the Endangered Species brand (read the label - they aren't all organic) and those have the percentage of cacao listed clearly on each chocolate bar.
As for the others, some seem legit. Pumpkin and blueberry pie, in particular. Of course pies are NOT all equal. I like to make them from scratch with reduced sugar. For pumpkin, I can reduce it from 3/4 c. to 1/3 c. and never miss it. Any lower than that and the pie starts tasting like a vegetable.
For someone buying pie at the grocery store, who knows what's in there... trans fats, preservatives, artificial flavoring, artificial coloring, artificial sweeteners OR perhaps a truckload of natural sweeteners. The all-natural blueberry pie my bakery sells tastes so sugary that I'd rather just eat a pint of fresh blueberries.
Overall, the advice Yahoo! gives just makes me uneasy. They miss the point that Michael Pollan made in one of his NY Times articles: Eat food, not nutrients. The nutrition panel's important but the processed stuff will never, ever equal the creations made by Mother Nature herself. Cramming extra calcium into junkfood may sound nice, but it won't nutritionally equal naturally calcium-rich foods (like rhubarb, if we're sticking to the pie theme).
My other hesitation is that some of their recommendations (namely, baked chips and whole grain newtons) would NEVER satisfy me if I were after greasy chips and gooey chocolate chip cookies. If I'm craving cookies, they better be my special recipe. I can substitute applesauce for butter and use whole grain flour, but that's about as far as I'm willing to budge on the issue. Better to sin and enjoy it than to go halfway and feel like you're depriving yourself.
The good news for me is that it takes a very small amount of the real thing to give me a stomach ache. I won't say it takes a small amount to satiate me because believe me, I'll never have two bites of a cookie and say "That was delicious. Now I'm ready to have a salad." But as little as a few spoonfuls of gelato make my stomach uncomfortable enough that junk no longer tempts me - at least until after I've eaten something healthy and a bit of time has passed.
Onto the second article. Another Kossack sent me this one and I think it made both of us want to just throw our hands up in the air and give up.
Here's what I mean:
In one case, her co-workers were raving about Pirate's Booty, a cheese-flavored puffed-rice snack. The label boasted that one serving contained 120 calories and 2.5 grams of fat. Yet when Hammock tasted it, she knew better.
"It didn't taste like a low-fat, low-calorie snack. It tasted like Cheez Doodles," she says.
Indeed, the lab found that Pirate's Booty contained 147 calories and 8.5 grams of fat per serving -- 6 grams more than the label claimed.
I used to chow down that stuff in college, believing it was a delicious, low fat snack. Whoops. The article says that Florida's Dept of Agriculture found that about 10% of products tested lie on their labels. Yikes!
All I can say is thank goodness for the farmers' market. They've got no labels, so they've also got no lies. But no one has to compare calories and fat and wonder whether the foods sold at the farmers' market are going to kill them. Right now we've got peaches, nectarines, plums, apricots, cherries, strawberries, and all kinds of vegetables here. My latest obsession is the muskmelons (a.k.a. cantaloupes) I've been getting from my strawberry guy. OMG, I'd choose these melons over ice cream any day.
I realize California's a bit exceptional (especially for fruit!) but back in Wisconsin, the farm where I had my CSA last year is offering a LONG list this week, including: arugula, beets (red, gold, and chioggia), basil, broccoli, burdock, carrots, cipollini onions, cilantro, cucumber, currants (red, white, and black) ... and that just gets you through the alphabet up to C.
I can't pretend I'm immune to craving sweets... I spent yesterday "tasting" cheesecake and chocolate dipped cookies while at work in the bakery. But as much as I can't resist those, now I'm sitting here looking at my CSA farm's website, drooling over the thought of their kohlrabi and sugar snap peas.
Developing tastes for fresh, whole foods sidesteps the problem of reading nutrition labels and hoping they aren't lies. We're always looking for the shortcuts - to make everything in season all the time with perfect standardization and a never-ending shelf-life, ALL while satisfying our bodies' pre-programmed affinity for fat, salt, and sugar - but it just isn't going to happen. When will our country wake up?
UPDATE: Right after I posted, I saw another article that says the 100-calorie snack pack business surpassed $20 mil a year. So you can pay more per calorie and still eat processed junk.
"The irony," said David Adelman, who follows the food industry for Morgan Stanley, "is if you take Wheat Thins or Goldfish, buy a large-size box, count out the items and put them in a Ziploc bag, you’d have essentially the same product." Mr. Adelman estimates that snack packs are about 20 percent more profitable than larger packages.
I can barely even put into words what I think about this. Food as the enemy is never going to work, and as long as our society runs on processed foods that make us fat and sick, food will continue to be the enemy. It's not that hard to break the cycle by getting delicious treats at a farmers' market or natural foods co-op instead. Not that anyone who reaches mainstream America is promoting that message...
