The marketing industry is one of the fitness industry’s biggest and most competitive rivals – marketing ploys are created on a daily basis to try and hide the hidden demons in foods.
Low fat foods, which are adorned with logos and slogans promoting ‘99% fat free’, ‘the healthy choice’, etc, may be low fat but they’re usually packed with carbohydrates that we’re never openly told about – carbs which are so well hidden under scientific terminology, that most consumers don’t know how many grams they in actually consuming.
Take for example, a popular health cereal by a well-known cereal brand – it promotes low fat, in fact virtually no fat almost at only 0.6g per 45g serve. Many would think, ‘great!’ and start snaking on bowls of cereal all day long, however, per 45g serve, there is also 33.7g of carbohydrates – an incredible amount, which if not burnt off will turn straight into sugar and then fat.
It’s extremely important for parents of young children to look out for this. Parents especially try and do the right thing by their children by buying low fat foods, but simply end up piling them with masses of carbohydrates which cause their sugar levels to rise and fall very dramatically.
Other serious offenders are all the vitamin-enhanced drinks, which claim to be incredibly good for you due to their added vitamin levels, but are packed with sugar. On one hand, yes, it’s great that they are packed with so many vitamins and nutrients – often things that you wouldn’t take in sufficiently through diet alone, but on the other hand, they are full of so much sugar that the negatives outweigh the positives. If you’re really concerned about your vitamin intake then the best thing to do is buy vitamin tablets and take these with water – by far the healthiest of options.
When tempted by the low fats and the healthy choices, make sure you read all of the stats – the marketers will obviously want to push the goodness and ignore everything else.
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