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By Marshall Melnychuk
Marshall Melnychuk/Healthy Observations
Life is busy. It’s a battle to get everything done on our ‘to-do’ list. Work, study, family, and oh yes let’s fit in some fitness and try to eat well. We know that eating well is important, but not only is it difficult and time consuming to do well; it is also hard to be sure if what you’re eating really is healthy. Big Food industry marketers like it that way.
I asked four health professionals this question, “What common food(s) do you find that your patients think are healthy and you believe is junk food?”
Top five answers are on the board and, survey said; Breakfast cereals, fruit wraps, granola bars, muffins and to make things interesting, Cheez Whiz.
Dr. Grant Pagdin is a well known physician in Kelowna and the Medical Director of iQuest Healthcare. Lisa Koski and Jean Gibson are both Registered Dietitians working with Interior Health and doing private consulting, and Dr. Alana Berg is a Naturopathic Physician practicing in Kelowna since 2005.
First on the list: Breakfast cereal
It won’t surprise anyone to know that cereals like Sugar Pops, Cocoa Puffs, Frosted Mini-Wheats and the like are complete junk. But many people are surprised when they find out how much sugar is in Kellogg’s mainstays like Corn Flakes and Special K.
Kellogg’s Corn Flakes
· First two ingredients: flaked milled corn, sugar
· Glycemic index, 92
· two grams of sugar per ¼ cup serving (do you know anyone that eats a ¼ cup of cereal?)
Kellogg’s Special K
· First three ingredients: rice, wheat gluten, sugar
Glycemic Index, 65 – 80
· two grams of sugar per ¼ cup serving. (Try and measure out a ¼ cup serving some time to how much that really is. It’s laughable. They list ¼ cup and most people are more likely to serve themselves two cups or more – that’s upwards of 16 grams of sugar, with a Glycemic index of 80!)
Special K is an easy one to pick on – easy and deserved. The hard working people at Kellogg’s do their darndest to present Special K as healthy, and it is unsuspecting adults who are the main target. The advertising for Special K is all about healthy lifestyle and, ‘start your day out right.’ You would believe by viewing their TV ads and website that Special K is a great choice toward a healthier, leaner you. Au contraire!
The Glycemic index (GI) is becoming better known but hardly anyone can tell you how a food ranks off the top of their head. Basically 50 and below is pretty good and the closer to 100 it is (or higher) the worse. This is important to know when it comes to breakfast cereals because not only do they contain a great deal of sugar, but the main ingredients like rice and milled corn are processed so much that the food turns into sugar in your body very quickly, leading to a higher GI score. Yes, the label may say rice or corn but they have processed out the goodness and left the sugar-high ingredients in.
Fruit Wraps are another good example of sugar and more concentrated sugar rolled up to look like it is really good for you. And the marketers make such an effort to have you believe you’re doing yourself, or worse, your kids a good thing by feeding it to them. Dr. Yoni Freedhoff wrote an article last week on Del Monte Fruit Twists. If you’re feeding these to your children you should read this.
When you hear the word ‘granola’ it just rings of down-to-earth wholesome health and the origins of granola are. Granola is the baked form of muesli which originally was a mixture of whole grains (unrefined), nuts, seeds, maybe dried fruit and some honey. Today, thanks to the progressive thinking of fast-food inventors and people who are paid to know their way around the fine print of ingredients-listing, granola bars are anything but wholesome and down to earth. An examination of the cereal aisle in your local grocer will reveal that once again the major ingredient of granola bars is, you guessed it, sugar.
Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain
· First three ingredients: wheat flour, oat flour, sugar.
· 12 grams of sugar per 37 gram serving
Kashi, proclaiming ‘all natural ingredients’
· First three ingredients: grains, brown rice syrup, juice concentrate
· eight grams of sugar per 35 gram serving
Nature Valley
· Peanuts, high maltose corn syrup, sugar
· 12 grams of sugar per 35 gram serving
Fibre 1, hailing 20 per cent fibre (with a name like that it must be good, right)
· 13 grams of sugar per 35 gram serving
· First three ingredients, glucose (sugar), fructose (sugar), chocolate… (sugar)
Muffins have their roots in hearty home baked goods like many foods. Who can resist the smell of fresh-from-the-oven bread or muffins (I can’t, this is my biggest weakness). The problem with muffins today is that they either have ‘Low Fat’ or they don’t.
If they are low-fat it means high sugar, and if it doesn’t say low-fat, it is high fat and most of it saturated – damned if you do, damned if you don’t. In our super-sized world nobody makes muffins the size they did decades ago – they would lose customers if they did. So in order to compete they have to make them big. Typically muffins in most coffee shops will average 500 calories. That means you will have to run for one whole hour to burn off the calories from one muffin.
Cheez Whiz is full of ‘Modified Milk Ingredients’. What exactly are modified milk ingredients? Sort of like the Caramilk secret and nobody will tell how they get the caramel into the middle of the caramilk bar. In this case Canadian regulations say that any product containing ingredients that were initially part of milk can be labelled as ‘Modified milk ingredients’. You really don’t know what you’re getting here.
Wired magazine did an interesting review of Cheez Whiz in October 2006. Although the listed ingredients individually are not terrible they’ve been chosen with ‘look and feel’ in mind. The goal of Cheez Whiz is to make it convenient, look good and above all, taste good. It’s processed, processed and processed some more.
CBC’s MarketPlace did a show on the topic of ‘Modified milk’ and processed foods a few years back which delved into the mumble-jumble existing within Canada’s food labelling regulations. Click here for the interesting story – it reinforces the need for ideas like ‘100 mile diets’ and ‘eating local’. The more a food product is processed the less nutritious it is, and if it says ‘processed’ or ‘modified’ on the label there is no way of telling the number of iterations of processing that food has gone through.
In last week’s article I closed by saying there’s a health war brewing between those trying to truly promote health versus big food companies intent on making profits at the cost of anyone and everyone’s health. Dr. David Butler-Jones is Canada’s chief public health officer and in a recent news story on Global News he commented on how the future may see governments and activist groups using similar tactics with big food that was used to fight tobacco companies. Here is part of what Dr. Butler-Jones had to say; Proposals include banning the advertising of unhealthy foods, increasing taxes on food that isn’t nutritious, subsidizing fruits and vegetables to make them more affordable for Canadians and forcing the food industry to change its labelling, packaging and ingredients.
“This is a legitimate public debate about how far you go with voluntary versus legal restrictions,” said Butler-Jones. “The timing for that, I think, really depends on when a community is educated enough, and ready enough and understands the implications.”
Do big food companies put profits ahead of the health of their customers? Do they knowingly market unhealthy and addictive foods? There is no doubt in my mind that the answer is yes. Appealing to their better nature only leads to spin doctoring (did you see the response Coca-Cola wrote after a Toronto newspaper editorial questioned the relationship between Coke and the Olympics? Click here). No, appealing to their conscience won’t work; we will have to hit them where it hurts.
Marshall Melnychuk is a manager and partner at iQuest Healthcare and Fitness Centre. For more information go to www.iquesthealth.ca
