How Food Becomes Candy

I just made a snack for my son: some pineapple, a few strawberries, and a low-fat cheese stick. He gobbled down the strawberries and poked at the pineapple. 

"You know I don't like new fruit, mom."

"Try it. You'll like it. It's super-sweet."

"Like candy?"

"Almost. I think fruit is sweeter than candy. It's like candy from nature."

This exchange reminded me of how quickly food in our world doesn't just taste like candy, it becomes candy. One stroll down the yogurt aisle proves it.

What is yogurt? Cultured milk, right? Yes. But look at the label for 90% of the yogurt in your grocery store and tell me how many are really yogurt. Let's take a look at Chobani's Pineapple Low-fat Yogurt for example. The package promises only natural ingredients, fruit on the bottom, and features that "it-must-be-good-for-me" buzz word for yogurt: "Greek". Flip it over and see what else it has:

Evaporated Cane Juice, Pineapple, Pectin, Pineapple Juice Concentrate, Locust Bean Gum, Natural Flavor, Turmeric (for Color).

First ingredient: sugar. Oops! This just became candy!

Let's try another one. Stoneyfield Farms Organic YoBaby Drinkable Yogurt for toddlers. It's organic, so it must be good, right? Well let's see. It starts out as yogurt with its first ingredient: cultured whole milk. Then it adds organic sugar. Woah! It just became candy! See how fast that happened? And I used to give that to my son. Yes it is organic but it doesn't matter anymore because this is not food. It's candy. And we don't eat candy because candy isn't food.

I made this at home. It was super yummy and had that oh-so-magical Greek yogurt, all-natural ingredients, and fruit on the bottom. And the top and middle, too. But it didn't have any sugar. It was not candy. It was food!  My little baby eats fruit and yogurt all the time, but not YoBaby. I make him Greek yogurt with some pureed mango mixed in. Sometimes blueberries. But no sugar. Babies don't eat candy, silly! 

Both Chobani and Stoneyfield Farms have some excellent products that actually are food. They are the ones where the list of ingredients begins and ends with, "cultured milk." I buy and eat them all the time and they're great! I add my own fruit and nuts to make them into a delicious snack that tastes like candy...but isn't.

I saw this at my local grocery store and knew that a lot of people would pick it up thinking it would be a healthy snack. Its fresh fruit and yogurt! Doesn't Gillian Michaels eat that? But wait...take a look at the ingredients list. I see cultured milk....and then a whole bunch of other stuff including sugar, artificial sweetener, corn starch, and down at the very bottom, fruit. This is not food. This is candy. Put it back and go get food.

The yogurt aisle is just one place where candy is pretending to be food. Check out the bread aisle, and OMG just the cereal aisle alone is practically like trick-or-treating. How do you not buy candy? Easy. Read the ingredients and put back anything that has sugar as one of the first five ingredients. Oh, and beware of anything with more than five ingredients. :) Hint: You might want to buy a bread maker and start eating oatmeal.

Candy is not forbidden in my house. We trick or treat and we have candy canes at Christmas and jelly beans at Easter just like everyone else. But, we don't let candy pretend it is food. The next time you head to the grocery store, plan to spend a little extra time reading labels and make sure you're buying actual food. 

Get out there and get healthy today, even if it means not letting your kids eat candy and call it food.

HH

What's that Food Label Mean?

It's National Nutrition Month!  It's great that this focus on nutrition also happens during a change of season, because I find that seasonal changes are a natural time to make upgrades or adjustments to our personal wellness.  Today I want to focus on deciphering marketing mumbo jumbo so we can figure out exactly what the lawyers who approve the packaging don't want us to think about.

So, here's a bit of the hard work done for you: a cheat sheet for reading through the marketing on food packages.  You might be surprised at what you learn...I know I was. You can find more information on food labeling here.  


Enriched. This is a tip-off that something bad was done to the food, requiring another process to put some of the good stuff back in.


100% Wheat doesn’t specify that it is actually whole wheat. It could have some whole wheat, or none. "Wheat" is a very broad term.


Multigrain just means that there are just a variety of grains without reference to what kind they are or whether they are whole grains. Doesn’t matter how many grains there are if they are all refined or bleached. Skip it.

Whole Grain doesn't cut it either.  It must say “100% Whole Grain”  to make it to my pantry.

"Supports Heart Health" sounds like a good thing, but only products with the words, “may reduce the risk of…” have ingredients that have been clinically shown to be effective in reducing a health risk. 


"Pure" is another tricky one. Of course you want to eat food that is pure; you would not want to put contaminated food into your body. But "pure" has no federally-regulated meaning in food labeling. It tells you nothing about what's in the package that perhaps should not be there.


Natural. Plenty of foods in the world are natural, but that doesn't mean you should eat them.  Fat is natural, but too much of it is a bad thing.  This word really says little about the nutritional quality of the food, or even its safety. Consumers believe that "natural" means the food is pretty much as Mother Nature grew it, but "natural" is not the same as nutritious.

Made From/Made With This simply means the food started with this product. For example, the claim "made from 100% corn oil" may be technically correct, yet it is misleading. The label really means the processor started with 100% corn oil, but along the way may have diluted or hydrogenated it, changing it into a fat that will clog your arteries, not one that flows free and golden.


Made with natural... This simply means the manufacturer started with a natural source, but by the time the food was processed it may be anything but "natural."


So what the heck are we supposed to buy?  It's actually easier than you think:

1. Shop around the perimeter of the store where the fresh food is.
2. Be a stickler for the details and insist on only 100% whole grain products.
3. Skip everything else. You don't need that crap.

And if you're interested to know what I buy at the store, check out my Clean Eating Shopping List.