Parents Confused, Misled by Nutrition Labels
January 19, 2010
NatrualNews
by E. Huff
Recent research conducted by the British Heart Foundation (NHF) has revealed that about 90 percent of British mothers do not properly understand food nutritional labels. Most of the women falsely believe that products claiming to be good sources of certain vitamins or rich in whole grains are healthy, despite the fact that many of them are actually chock full of unhealthy ingredients.
The most common labeling scheme identified by researchers was the front-labeling of foods that are high in fat and sugar with glowing health claims. While partially true in some cases, phrases like “naturally-flavored” and “no artificial ingredients” were found to be commonly used on breakfast products that are high in refined sugar and bad saturated fats. One cereal claiming to boost heart health and maintain a healthy body was found to have more sugar per serving than a doughnut. Another breakfast cereal bar claiming to be high in vitamins was found to have more saturated fat and sugar than a piece of chocolate cake.
Food manufacturers have received heavy criticism in recent years for alleged advertising strategies that target children with unhealthy foods. Reluctant parents often give in because of health claims that, when examined more closely, seem to contradict the nutrition label. Unfortunately, most busy parents fail to recognize advertising discrepancies.
When asked in the survey, participants indicated that they would prefer a nutrition labeling system that was consistent and placed entirely on the front of food packaging. As it currently stands, product manufacturers are not required to label their products in any specific manner other than the mandatory nutritional facts label located on product backs. This is true both in the U.K. and in the U.S.
Spokesmen from various food companies countered the claims of the study, indicating that the labeling on their packaging is both truthful and transparent. All ingredients can be found on the nutrition label as can the amounts of fat, salt and sugar. Food producers are continually adjusting their product formulations to meet the demands of their customers, they say, cutting things like sodium and saturated fat and including healthier ingredients.
Researchers from BHF, however, continue to demand that stricter labeling laws be put in place in order to alleviate some of the confusion over food nutrition. They believe that a standardized system of labeling will help to clarify how healthy a product really is and lead to a more informed consumer base.
Orthorexia: Obsessing Over Health Food
September 5, 2009
ABC News
By John Stossel and Miguel Sancho
It’s no surprise that a lot of Americans watch what they eat. Counting calories, nutrients and fat grams is practically a national pastime.
But what happens when people go over the line, and the pursuit of healthy eating actually becomes unhealthy?
For Johnny Righini, a 26-year-old from California, eating a nutritious lunch is a painstaking ritual.
“Sometimes it takes days to prepare meals, because I have to sprout things, ferment things,” he said. “I am constantly thinking about what I am gonna have for my next meal.”
Charlotte Andersen, a 29-year-old Minnesota mother of three, says she went through the same thing.
“It really turned into a huge problem, and I think that there are a lot of other people out there that have this issue,” she said.
Food took over her life. She compulsively catalogued everything she ate.
“I was obsessed with things like macro-nutrient ratios, numbers, charts,” she said.
She realized she had a problem when she started paying more attention to food than to her own children.
A New Kind of Eating Disorder
What Righini and Andersen are struggling with is a kind of an obsessive compulsive disorder focused on health food called “orthorexia.” The term was coined by Dr. Steve Bratman, author of the book “Health Food Junkies.”
Bratman spent years in the health food movement, but became one of its critics after he realized he had started to become orthorexic.
“I suffered from a psychological obsession with food,” he said. “When I was involved with this, it took up way too much of my life experiences when there were other things I could have been doing.”
Orthorexia is different from anorexia, Bratman said.
“Anorexics seem to always think they’re fat,” he said, but “orthorexics know they’re thin, but they want to be pure.”
For people like Righini and Andersen, orthorexia is “a disease disguised as a virtue,” Bratman said, because society approves of health consciousness. Americans spend millions on diet books hawking things like macrobiotics, the Zone, the Blood-type diet. And dieting is OK, up to a point.
“But when it gets to the point where your health is overtaking your life, I think that’s when it gets to be a problem,” Andersen said.
Striving for Purity
Because they pursue purity in the food they eat, orthorexics are disgusted by processed food like macaroni and cheese. And Righini said even something as seemingly innocent as an apple could be toxic, because “if it’s not organic, probably what goes into the soil is going go into the food, and then it goes into you.”
With toxins lurking everywhere, orthorexics end up avoiding much of what most of us eat.
“I took out tropical fruits, because they were too high in sugar,” Andersen said. “I took out root vegetables, because they had too many carbohydrates.”
Andersen couldn’t eat at restaurants or friends’ homes, fearing she would be pressured to eat impure foods.
“I was afraid that if I got anything wrong I was going to get cancer,” she said. And plenty of diet gurus will tell you, Andersen was right to worry.
“You become what you consume. You consume dead food, and death accelerates its presence,” diet guru Viktoras Kulvinskas said.
Kulvinskas is a leading advocate of the “raw food” diet.
Raw foodists believe cooking vegetables even a little destroys their nutritional value. And eating meat is even worse, Kulvinskas said, because you eat the animal’s fear.
“When they go through slaughter, they go through a lot of fear, and that fear is taken into the dietary habits of America.”
Everyone knows that eating too much meat can be a problem. But does Kulvinskas even make sense? All over the world, as people have gotten wealthier, they are eating more cooked food, more meat and life spans keep increasing.
“That’s correct,” Kulvinskas said, adding that people are “sicker than ever. Living longer doesn’t mean quality of life. It only says that you’re living longer under medical intervention. These are not natural, whole people.”
Kulvinskas believes a raw food diet is the only way to be healthy, but according to Bratman, “a raw food diet is tricky. It’s easy to not get enough calories in a raw food diet.”
While raw foodists can be healthy if they rigorously follow the diet to get essential nutrients, “the theory itself doesn’t focus on those nutrients, usually. It focuses more on the spiritual qualities of the food.”
Of course, for some people, spending so much time thinking about health food is no worse than other fanatical obsessions, like hording or compulsive shopping. But orthorexia can really hurt people.
A Family’s Heartbreak
“I began to hear stories of people who took this to such an extent that they harmed themselves, physically,” Bratman says.
One of the people Bratman heard from was Kate Finn, a former gymnast from Rhode Island. Finn developed orthorexia after she moved to California and began trying diets like raw foodism.
“She was so absorbed with cleansing her body of toxins … that was her lifelong goal,” said Erin Finn, Kate’s sister.
In the quest for purity, Finn eliminated more and more from her diet. Her appearance deteriorated. “The beautiful, vibrant Kate had really become someone that looked much older. People would stare,” Erin Finn said.
Finn wasn’t anorexic. Erin Finn said her sister knew she was underweight, but she insisted on eating only foods she considered “pure.”
Like Charlotte Anderson, Kate Finn kept a diary documenting her desperate descent. One entry reads, “What do I do to gain weight? I’m afraid, confused.”
Finally, Finn agreed to let her family take her to a hospital.
“Our niece went to pick her up,” her sister said, “and found her.”
But it was too late. She was discovered dead, at age 37. As Finn’s family read through her diary, they learned that she had been listening to several health food gurus. Among the experts: Viktoras Kulvinskas.
Kulvinskas’s appearance in Finn’s diary doesn’t surprise him.
“I’m in the diary of so many people who overcome cancer, asthma and diabetes,” he said. “My compassion reaches out to her that she took the path. Well, at least she got detoxified and clean, and moved on into another incarnation.”
Living With Orthorexia
Kulvinskas says orthorexics are emotionally unstable people to begin with, people like Johnny Righini and Charlotte Andersen, who have prior histories with other eating disorders. He says they take sound dietary teachings and twist them to unhealthy extremes.
“Last time I weighed myself I was about 78 pounds,” Righini said. “I am 26 years old, and I was told my bones are equivalent to someone 85 years old. That’s pretty depressing.”
But Righini remains locked in the grip of his orthorexic eating.
“Why would I want to stop? Why would I want to eat that stuff and kill myself even faster?” he said. “That’s what my orthorexic mind says. How can I stop?”
With psychotherapy, Charlotte Andersen was able to stop. Now she says her obsession with pure food was destroying her health.
“I was trying so hard to control how I was going to die, and in the end nobody gets to pick how they die,” she said. “We only get to pick how we live, and I wasn’t living.”
Click here for the full report from ABC News
Consumers Duped by Trans Fat Labeling
August 28, 2009
Natural News
By David Gutierrez
FDA food labeling rules make it possible for consumers to exceed their maximum recommended daily intake of trans fats even if they eat only foods labeled “zero trans fats” per serving.
Trans fats, also known as hydrogenated oils, are synthetically produced by adding hydrogen atoms to unsaturated vegetable oils. Unlike natural unsaturated or saturated fats, trans fats have no nutritional value. They have been overwhelmingly shown to increase the risk of death from cardiovascular disease, such that several large cities and the state of California have banned their use in restaurants.
The fats are favored by food producers because they have a longer shelf life than natural fats. But growing consumer awareness over the dangers of trans fats has led more and more people to avoid them. According to a recent survey by Greenfield Online, 72 percent of U.S. residents read nutritional labels to make food purchasing decisions, and 61 percent believe that “zero trans fats” is the most important claim for a heart-healthy food.
Yet because the FDA allows nutrient content to be rounded to the nearest half gram, all food producers need to do to make a “zero trans fats” claim is set the serving size low enough that it contains no more than 0.49 grams of trans fats.
According to Steve Hughes, chief executive officer of Smart Balance, even consumers looking out for trans fats on nutritional labels “could exceed the daily limit before they even sit down to dinner.”
The FDA recommends a maximum daily trans fat intake of two grams.
Consumers can still avoid trans fats by reading ingredient labels. Any food that contains “hydrogenated” or “partially hydrogenated” oils actually contains trans fats, regardless of what it might say on the label or in the nutritional information box.
“The good news is Americans are making healthier food choices a priority and they clearly recognize the dangers of trans fat,” said dietitian Alyse Levine. “But unfortunately reading the fine print is necessary to ensure they’re not getting more trans fat and putting their health at greater risk than they bargained for.”
Click here for the full report from Natural News
Sweet Surrender: Sugar Curbs Urged
August 25, 2009
Wall Street Journal
By Ron Winslow and Shirley S. Wang
The American Heart Association is taking aim at the nation’s sweet tooth, urging consumers to significantly cut back on the amount of sugar they get from such foods as soft drinks, cookies and ice cream.
In a scientific statement issued Monday, the organization says most women should limit their sugar intake to 100 calories, or about six teaspoons, a day; for men, the recommendation is 150 calories, or nine teaspoons.
The recommendations are likely to prove challenging for many consumers to meet. Just one 12-ounce can of cola has about 130 calories, or eight teaspoons of sugar.
Data gathered during a national nutrition survey between 2001 and 2004 suggest that Americans consume on average 355 calories, or more than 22 teaspoons, of sugar a day.
“We’re trying to make reasonable recommendations around the amount of sugar in a diet that enables people to achieve or maintain a healthy weight,” said Rachel Johnson, associate provost and professor of nutrition at the University of Vermont in Burlington and lead author of the statement.
As the heart association’s statement acknowledges, the science directly linking added sugar consumption to obesity is inconsistent. This in part reflects, the impact of such things as genetics, physical activity and diet have on weight.
The heart association has encouraged consumers to moderate sugar consumption, but the new statement is the first time it has suggested specific limits. The recommendations apply only to what are known as added sugars—those that are added to foods during manufacturing, or by consumers. They don’t include sugar that occurs naturally in fruits, vegetables, dairy products and other foods.
Marion Nestle, a professor of nutrition and food studies at New York University who wasn’t involved with the document, said it was a significant departure from previous recommendations, in part because “nobody has ever said it quite so forcefully.”
The statement heightens the battle against foods that many public-health officials say contribute to the higher risk of such problems as diabetes and cardiovascular disease among the nation’s overweight and obese consumers. A recent unrelated study by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said the medical costs associated with treating obesity-related conditions may have reached $147 billion last year, up from $74 billion a decade ago.
Major Sources
The chief sources of added sugar in the diet include soft drinks, candy, desserts such as cakes and cookies, fruit drinks and sweetened dairy products, including ice cream and yogurt, the statement says. Sugar in alcoholic beverages also counts as added sugar, Dr. Johnson said.
Added sugars “offer no nutritional value other than calories to the diet,” Dr. Johnson said. “The majority of Americans could reduce their risk of heart disease by achieving healthy weight and the evidence is fairly clear that reducing the amount of sugars can help with that.”
While many studies associate increased consumption of soft drinks with higher calorie intake, weight gain and obesity, others have failed to support the connection. Similarly, research investigating added sugar’s impact on blood pressure, heightened inflammation and on changes in blood fats called triglycerides is inconclusive. And there are no studies linking the recommended limits to preventing weight gain or promoting weight loss.
Instead, Dr. Johnson and her colleagues on the heart association’s nutrition committee based the suggestions on the concept of discretionary calories that are part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s dietary guidelines called Mypyramid. Discretionary calories are those allotted to a person beyond what are necessary to consume nutrients essential to a healthy diet while still maintaining a proper weight.
Under the Mypyramid guidelines, people on a 2,000-calorie-per-day diet have 267 discretionary calories. Active young people on a 3,000-calorie-a-day-diet have 512 discretionary calories.
Dr. Johnson said the committee decided that allocating half of the discretionary calories for added sugar was a proper course. More than that risks displacing necessary nutrients with calories from added sugar, she said.
For a moderately active middle-aged woman on a 1,800 calorie-a-day diet, the recommendations translate to about 100 calories for added sugar. For a sedentary middle-aged man consuming 2,200 calories a day, the allotment is about 150 calories.
Dr. Johnson said the statement doesn’t tell people to eliminate sugar from their diets. She does recommend using the allotment to make healthier foods more tasty, such as adding sugar to whole-grain cereal, instead of using it on candy. People who get regular exercise, she said, can consume higher quantities of added sugar.
William Dietz, director of the division of nutrition, physical activity and obesity at the CDC, said the guidelines are reasonable, but he said it may be difficult for the public to understand the recommendation in terms of grams of sugar intake.
‘Sugar Burden’
Instead, “I think it’s easier to talk to people about what types of foods are likely to contribute to the sugar burden,” with sugar-sweetened beverages like soft drinks and fruit juices at the top of the list, he said.
Consuming added sugar in drinks is particularly problematic, he said, because it doesn’t make you feel as full as when you eat solid food.
Quillian Haralson, 38, of Waldorf, Md., says he would try to adhere to the recommendations and pay special attention to the sugar intake of his two children.
But, he said, it would be challenging to figure out how much added sugar is in different foods.
Mr. Haralson, a high-school teacher, said he is attentive to his three-year-old son’s sugar intake, for instance, but he said he couldn’t estimate how much the child is currently consuming.
“That’s the sad part; I can’t tell you,” he said.
Current food labels don’t list sugar content in calories or teaspoons and don’t distinguish between natural and added sugars, Dr. Johnson said.
Click here for the full report from the Wall Street Journal
