Impact Detroit Magazine Impact Detroit Magazine 2013 | Page 17

DECIPHERING F O O D L A B E L S By Brenda McCants Making The Choice and Transition to a Healthy Lifestyle Easy B uying food these days can seem almost like playing Russian roulette. With all the news stories we hear on a day to day basis of the horrors of food recalls, toxic cancercausing food additives, E-coli & salmonella out breaks, trying to find safe healthy edible foods for your family can seem like a daunting task. Looking at the sea of so called healthy choices in today’s grocery market shelves trying to find something nutritious yet delicious, can seem like trying to find a needle in a hay stack. With more American’s turning towards being more health conscious many companies are jumping on the natural & healthy bandwagon in doing so there’s been a flood of new products on supermarket shelves claiming to be natural & healthy while most are anything but. Many people unknowing grab something that says healthy or natural without looking at the ingredients to see if it is in fact, healthy or all natural. This ignorance is exactly what the food companies are banking on & it’s paying off for them royally. A product only has to have a one naturally derived ingredient to say it contains all natural ingredients. Clever marketing, wording and product placement are designed to trick the average consumer into thinking that paying a few extra dollars for a so called healthy product is a small price to pay for their families health. When in fact they are being deceived, robbed blind and still not accomplishing their goal of eating whole health nutrient dense products. If you go to the grocery store and just observe 95% of consumers just put things into their buggy without so much as looking at the back list of ingredients. Most Americans don’t even know how to read an ingredients list and no wonder it seems like a daunting task, deciphering an ingredients list is more comparable to reading a complex science experiment than something you’re supposed to eat. This reasoning is because most foods on today’s shelves are like a complex experiment. (of foodlike products). Some products are almost completely devoid of any nutrients, but that’s another article. So, how do you make sure you’re not being deceived and you’re getting the best for your family and dollar? You have to break free from the crowd and know what you’re putting in your mouth. In order to do so you must know how to decipher that complex code of chemicals and ingredients. You must know what’s good for you and know what to avoid at all cost. So, I’ll break it down for you in steps so that your next trip to your local grocery store will be an informed one and you can make wiser decisions for your family. The first step is to know how much of each ingredient is in the food you wish to consume. The ingredients are listed in order to their proportion included in the product. For instance in an ingredients list of flour, milk, eggs and butter the milk would have the most by volume included in the products, followed [1]