Food Lie #5: Foods labeled low fat are good for you

by Jari Love

Marketing often tells us to eat low fat foods and whole grain foods in order to be healthy. In some ways this is true because foods high in saturated fats are bad for us as are highly processed foods like white bread. However, there can still be a lot of issues with these so-called “healthy foods” marketed as “low-fat” or “whole-grain”: they can often be heavily processed and include lots of sugar and salt to make up for lack of flavour.

If you look at the nutrition labels of some low fat foods, you will notice there’s a high amount of sugar and salt. For example, low fat yogurt has a higher sugar and salt content than the full fat version because sugar and salt are used to replace the flavor lost through the removal of the fat. As a result, this low fat food now has all the dangers which accompany high sugar foods: addictions and chemical imbalances. Consequently, companies will replace the sugar with aspartame in order to decrease the sugar content on their labels. Major red flags for aspartame which has been linked with some serious health issues. Overall, this “yogurt” is now a heavily processed food that bears no resemblance to the yogurt nature intended.

Similarly, foods marketed as “whole-grain” sound like they should be good for you. However, although the whole-grain may be used in your pasta or bread, or at least marketed as such, there is an over-abundance of preservatives, sugars, and salts also added to your food in order to make that pasta and bread still taste good thus negating the benefits of the whole grains.

Our taste buds have acquired a taste for flavor-filled foods. The food marketing industry is huge and has a lot of influence over the way we perceive food and healthy choices. Don’t believe the lies they tell you. Always ask yourself, is this food from the ground? Can I pronounce all the ingredients? Are there less than 3 ingredients in that food? Is that food made in a factory or a farm? Be smart, make the non-processed choice and your body with thank you.