To Parents Mesmerised by the Claims on Processed Food Packages of Nutrition Calories are but a Distant Memory
It's been a few months on since you made that New Year's resolution to stay health-conscious, lose weight and all that sort of thing. But as well-intentioned and health where is your, you do have to admit that you've managed to put on a few pounds and a short few months you've had since the year began. If you're looking for something to blame for it, here's a good one: when you pay close attention to food nutrition calories are something you just have to forget about. This is something that's made up actually; Americans really have been paying more attention to eating healthy wholesome food that ever before; and getting better-fed and fatter for all their trouble. When Americans are given a choice of helpful and nutritious food, they tend to overlook how there's been a lot of cream, cheese and butter slathered on.
Let's look at what it is like in Brooklyn, a place with a great health movement, where people have great access to organic food from a food co-op. The supermarkets in this area have lots of custom-made healthy stuff like whole wheat bread, X-treme Fruit Bites, and Zany Corn - everything the healthy-minded would want. These packages are usually clearly marked as having no trans fats, no corn syrup, no genetically modified contents, and so on If you stand by the checkout and look at the kinds of things that people pile into their carts, you will see that once people see a few magic health words like "no corn syrup and no GM" they kind of forget to look at the nutrition facts label. A lot of these healthy snacks doubtless offer great additive free nutrition calories notwithstanding. But if they looked at someone with a can of Red Bull loaded with far fewer , they would turn away shocked at the health irresponsibility; even if they probably have ten days' worth of calories in their shopping cart with three days of supplies.
The moment people see a label on the back of chips that says Zero Trans Fats, a lightbulb lights up over their heads that tells them that what they see before them is undoubtedly healthy. With that, everything else about the bag of chips, cholesterol, high salt and fat, are all forgotten. Public service spots and reports somehow tend to make people feel they only need to change this one thing that did the public service ads talk about, and all will be well. This happens to just have the effect of blinding people to forget everything else that is wrong about their diet. That's the problem in America; everything is made such a fuss over, that even a world first like the trans fats ban, can ultimately end up in doing more harm than good.
What is worse, when people see a healthful label on a package, it can fool them into forgetting that if they gorge as much as they want on it, they'll still end up getting plenty of salt, fat and other nasties. Just as they do with low tar cigarettes, low-fat chips, end up getting people to eat two or three times as they otherwise would. A customer at Burger King is under no illusion how many fats making calories he is eating. Subway is supposed to be much healthier; their advertisements say how their sandwiches, cut down 60% on the fat as compared to a Big Mac. Customers will add a Diet Coke to their order, and before they know it, their Subway meal has 60% more calories than the Big Mac. This is what comes of leaving public education to commercial advertisements. People need to just start to pay attention to the ways their minds trick the,