Food Labels & Your Health

April 20, 2010

Interview with Susan Burke March, author of the book Making Weight Control Second Nature: Living Thin Naturally

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Mike Carruthers:
When you go grocery shopping you’ll notice that food packages have a lot of pretty pictures and fancy words to lure you in.

Susan Burke March:
The point is that you have to read the package ingredient label before you read the front. I’m always saying, “Read the package from back to front”.

Registered Dietician Susan Burke March, author of the book Making Weight Control Second Nature...
 

If you’re looking for something with fruit in it, for example; fruit juice – the first ingredient should be 100% fruit juice. And a lot of parents might be looking at the front of the label and seeing beautiful pictures of fruit. And if they just read the ingredient label the first ingredient for some of these fruit juice drinks is water. And then the second ingredient might be sugar and then maybe down the road there might be some fruit juice concentrate.

Product names don’t necessarily mean much either for example…

There is no fruit in Fruit Loops, in fact there is no fruit in fruit roll ups and these are items that are mostly sugar and additives and vegetable coloring.

And because a product is labeled organic doesn’t make it healthier.

I went to the grocery store and I saw Pop Tarts and now I see them labeled organic. Well does that make that necessarily better for you? It’s still going to have a lot of calories and it might not have any fiber, it might have some organically grown and manufactured foods but it doesn’t mean that it’s a better for you product.

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here