What happens when marketers make nutrition choices for you? Part Deux.
11 August 2005If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I inadvertently chopped off the last page of KerPlunk short blurb on trans fats last weekhere is the entire article bottom line? Read labels and avoid heavily processed foods that contain TFAs.
What happens when marketers make nutrition choices for you? by Andy Plunk
What happens when advertisers choose what you eat? You get fat, have higher rates of cancer and cardiovascular disease and live a shorter and probably more painful life from eating foods that are completely unlike what nature intended. Health costs and insurance premiums soar and governments have to make hard choices about whose care they will fund. This should all sound pretty familiarits exactly what is happening in the U.S. today. Our diets arent completely to blame; our cultures move towards sedentary jobs and equally inactive leisure time has made a pretty big impact, too. But any attempt to better your health has to start by taking a hard look at what you eat. There arent a lot of food manufacturers out there with your best interests at heart. I know its easy to demonize groups of people and point fingers, but lets face facts. Food manufactures are running businesses and most of them will always choose the bottom line over your health if they feel they have no other option. The fat-free craze is a good example. Lots of foods were (and still are) marketed low-fat or fat-free. Early on food makers realized that removing fat resulted in products that tasted bad and no one cared to eat. The compromise to balance consumer tastes with health and marketability of their products. The solution was removing the fat and replacing it with something else to maintain flavor, usually either extra salt or sugar. High Fructose Corn Syrup and excess sodium were often used to shore up taste shortfalls. Another wily food science trick is the use of partially hydrogenated oils: trans fatty acids. These are fats that receive a chemical treatment so they will stay solid at room temperature.
TFAs are man-made and are not found in nature, though small amounts of trans fats are produced in the gastro intestinal tract of cows. Trans fatty acids increase shelf life and improve the taste of many prepared foods. Canned biscuits and cake frosting are fluffier and your crackers are crunchier as a result of TFA. Unlike other fats, our bodies have absolutely no need for them and in fact TFA can do a great deal of harm. The problem is worse for people who eat fast food often or consume a lot of cheap frozen dinners. There are all kinds of health problems associated with trans fats. They have a negative effect on blood lipid levels, increasing the bad LDL cholesterol while decreasing the good HDL cholesterol. The Harvard School of Public Health estimated in 1994 that eating trans fats could be linked to 30,000 premature deaths due to heart disease every year. The data was pretty convincing but lobbying from the food industry kept trans fats off nutrition labels until 2003. Label laws were granted a phase in period that lasts until January 1, 2006. If you want specific information about health associated with TFA, the Harvard School of Public Health has an excellent summary: http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/reviews/transfats.html
One movie you should see if you havent already is Super Size Me. Morgan Spurlock, the guy who eats nothing but McDonalds for a month and what happens to him as a direct result should be a wakeup call to everyone who eats lots of fast food. On a related TFA note, please note that margarine is a TFA product. It appears that the people who are supposed to be looking out for us dont do a very good job. Public health officials are failing to protect us while advertising gurus are bombarding us with information. Our attention spans has gotten shorter and shorter. Cut out as much heavily processed (and subsequently over-marketed) food as you can and eat a good balance of real food that youve prepared yourself. Read nutrition labels. Look for long words that it takes a degree in chemistry to understand. Avoid foods with high fructose corn syrup and partially hydrogenated oil. If these ingredients are listed in the top three or four (theyre listed in order of percentage) stay away from that product.
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