Corporations Make Healthy Eating Choices Very Difficult

It's often been pointed out—including by me—that the large purveyors of fast food serve unhealthy food—high in fat, calories, and sodium—and thus bear some of the blame for the epidemic of obesity in America and increasingly in other countries as well, as we are exporting our obesity along with our culture and our food.

However, there is a sense in which they should not get the chief blame. With their triple cheeseburgers, they are giving the public what they want. Many people are not health-conscious or do not have the knowledge to make health-conscious decisions about what they eat. Or, other considerations may trump any issues of good nutrition.

But, there are many people who try to eat healthy; and often these people are not well-served by the corporations who make and sell our food.

There is a lot of misleading marketing of food. Many products like nutritional supplements make unsubstantiated claims. (These claims are not adequately regulated by the government; the labels must merely carry a fine-print statement saying, "These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration.")

Many products like energy drinks, energy bars, "power bars," and so forth are worthless. Many products that boast their fiber content contain so-called isolated fiber, which may not have the health benefits of natural fiber.

Many products made to sound healthy are full of unnatural and processed ingredients. For example, not yogurt but "yogurt powder"; not fruit but some concoction that's starch, sugar and coloring, with maybe a little fruit juice.

Some examples: According to the magazine Nutrition Action Health Letter, published by the Center for Science in the Public Interest (the people who have made in-the-news exposés of movie-theater popcorn and so forth), the following products, which are pitched to those seeking gluten-free foods, may not be truly healthful:

• Glutino Gluten Free Blueberry Breakfast Bars, which are "junk" because their "blueberry filling" has more sugar, apple powder, white grape juice concentrate, and water than blueberries.
• Glutino "gluten-free pretzels coated with premium yogurt" are largely made of corn starch and potato starch; the yogurt coating contains yogurt listed as last among its ingredients, meaning that, by quantity, it's the smallest of the ingredients in the yogurt coating.
• Food Should Taste Good Sweet Potato All Natural Chips contain more corn and corn oil than sweet potato. And some "veggie chips" have more salt than some of the veggie-derived ingredients.

Brands, and stores, who might try to make us think they deal in healthy food, often are doing quite the opposite. The so-called "health food supermarkets" deal in food that is high in sodium. They have bakery departments that sell us concoctions of sugar and fat (though no canny consumer truly expects these things to be healthy).

So it's very much a case of "let the buyer beware." More and more of us these days eat more and more food that we do not prepare from scratch but is served to us or it comes in a package. And even those who want to eat healthy often have an almost impossible job when making their food-buying choices.

Copyright © 2011 by Richard Stein