Healthy Foods Add to Consumer’s Confusion

What’s healthy and what’s not?

This is a good question.
Society is bombarded with new products every day, ranging from “energy drinks” to prepackaged 100 calorie snack bags filled with chocolate chip cookies.

Armed with customer loyalty cards and .50 cent coupons, consumers march to the grocery store to make heads or tails of all the products available to them.

Most packaging is fancy and is designed to draw your eye to it. Product placement isn’t done without a profitable strategy. Chances are you’ve saw a few commercials or maybe even tried a sample at the store. (Typically a Saturday afternoon in my neck of the woods.)

I couldn’t tell you how many products are advertised as being:

The one thing that you have to remember is that these products contain calories
which are the units of energy that are either burned or stored as fat. The calories are what count, not really the fact that something is low-carb or no-fat.

Reading Nutritional Labels is really the only way to get an understanding of how healthy a food product is.

Understand Serving Sizes. Almost all food products have more than one serving per can, bag or bottle. To calculate the actual calories for a product you need to multiply the number of servings by the number of calories per serving. It doesn’t really matter if something is low carb if calories have been added to make up the difference in taste.

The next time you grocery shop, be sure to take a look to see “what’s inside” by reading the label and keeping an eye on the calories per serving. Pay attention to other things like cholesterol, sugars and sodium to make an educated decision on your food choices.