How to Be a Conscious Eater

meant the food itself was really a beet-flavored potato chip,

not a beet chip.

Despite regulations insisting that imagery not be mislead-

ing, the definition of that rule remains rather subjective. Take

strawberry-flavored toaster pastries with that strawberry

pinup on the box. Then you see that actual strawberries are

MIA on the ingredients list. The manufacturer instead essen-

tially made a composite likeness through some pureed apple,

Red 40 dye (which contains cancerous compounds, mind you),

and artificial strawberry flavor. Nothing against apples, but

you probably thought you were diversifying your fruit intake

or getting a more premium ingredient in your product.

Emphasizing certain information to make you overlook other informa-

tion: Sometimes a label on the front will say “0 grams trans

fat,” but the product actually packs on the saturated fat. Ditto

for a product having a product having “No added sugar” while

soaring in sodium. This is another reason to routinely flip the

product over to check the Nutrition Facts panel.

Another issue may be that the numbers on the front are

large, yet it’s hard to make out the Percent Daily Value. Like the

selectiveness of the facts themselves, this difference from the

Nutrition Facts panel also appears to be by design. For instance,

500 mg potassium may sound high, but it’s only 14 percent of

your Daily Value. Five grams of saturated fat may sound low,

but it’s 25 percent of your Daily Value, which is actually a lot

when tucked into a small amount of food.

USING WORDS THAT ARE TECHNICALLY

ALLOWED BUT HAVE LITTLE MEANING

(or a meaning that’s not what most of us would expect)

“Reduced”: This means the product contains 25 percent less of

something—usually sodium or fat—than the original version

of that product. It does not mean the amount of that substance

Stuff that Comes from Factories 185

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