4 Seemingly Healthy Food Labels That Are Misleading
If you want to know what exactly is going into your body, reading the ingredients label and nutritional facts on a package of any food product is one of the smartest things you can do. By figuring out important information from these labels, you will be better suited to make the decisions that will improve your dietary plan and overall health in general.
However, it’s an unfortunate fact of today’s society that many times, food labels can be incredibly misleading. What’s more is that many healthy claims that are proudly displayed on these labels may not necessarily be as significant as they would seem to be. Here are the food labels you need to be a little more discerning about, since more often than not, you just can’t take their claims at face value.
Natural
If a food product is labeled as being “natural”, how can it not be healthy, right? Unfortunately this is often times nothing more than an empty word with absolutely no meaning or guarantees behind it. The FDA has pretty much no way to regulate the use of this word,so pretty much any company can slap the term onto their product without even really being honest about it. Often times, products that claim to be natural are actually filled with chemicals and unnatural additives.
No Nitrates
This certainly sounds safe. People tend to assume that this means a food product contains none of this cancerous chemical preservative. Unfortunately, it usually just means that a naturally based nitrate was used in its place, which essentially cures the meat in the same chemical matter as a synthetic nitrate would do.
Made With Real Fruit
Companies know that we want to increase our servings of fruit every day, and so they’ll slap this label on as a way to entice customers to buy their product. The thing is, companies can stick this label on and add the word “flavoring” in tiny print right after it, which is what it really is. Yogurt that’s made with “real fruit” tends to be yogurt with high fructose corn syrup and fruit flavoring, nothing more.
No Added Hormones
In order to cut costs and speed up production rates, hormones are often added to cattle feed in order to make them grow faster and bigger, while producing more milk at a faster rate as well. This is not only deeply unnatural, but harmful to everyone along the food chain. This is really just an issue of semantics, since the USDA has banned use of the term “hormone free”, which pushed companies into using “no added hormones” instead.
Used under Creative Commons Licensing courtesy of peddhapati
