Food Label Trickery: 5 Things To Look Out For

Food manufacturers often use front label trickery to imply that their brands are healthier than they really are. I made this mistake the other day - despite usually being quite fanatical about reading the ingredients list and nutrition facts, I got lured by the word 'Natural' on the front of my organic yoghurt, only to find that it

was packed full of sugar!

When you combine the front label AND the nutrition facts on the back, you're best placed to make sense of all the label trickery that's the norm on many of our supermarket shelves.

Here are the top five ways that food manufacturers will try to trick you with their labelling:

1. 101 different names for sugar

One of the most common tricks is to distribute sugars among many ingredients so that sugars don't appear in the top three. For example, a manufacturer may use a combination of sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup, barley malt, brown sugar, caramel, corn syrup solids, dextrose, fructose and other sugar ingredients to make sure none of them are present in large enough quantities to attain a top position on the ingredients list (remember, the ingredients are listed in order of their proportion in the food, with the most common ingredients listed first).

2. Super-shrinking the healthy ingredients

Another trick is to put lots of healthy-sounding ingredients on the list, when in reality they're in such minuscule amounts that it's hardly worth mentioning as far as the health benefits are concerned. Your product might contain goji berries or spirulina and espouse all the health benefits, when there may be so little of it that you're just throwing good money down the drain, and being tricked as you do so.

3. Manipulating serving sizes

Food manufacturers are really clever at manipulating serving sizes to make you think you're not eating that much sugar or trans-fats or any other ingredient you're trying to avoid. For example, the yoghurt I mentioned earlier was a 500g tub and said it contained 4 servings - which is 125g per serve. However, if you bought an individual tub they are nearly always 175g or 200g. This is a sneaky little trick, and it's especially dangerous with food you should consider treats.

4. Fooling you with product names

I got fooled myself with the word 'natural'. 'Natural' and 'organic' are great tricks of the trade. The food manufacturer of my yoghurt wasn't lying when it said my yoghurt was natural - sugar is natural, after all. But be extra careful when you just read the front of the product - learn from my mistake! Also, some countries have far more stringent rules than others for labelling food as 'organic'. Always make sure your food is organically certified by a reputable certifier.

5. Hiding other ingredients

As well as sugar coming in many different guises, another one to be aware of is MSG. Monosodium glutamate has many different names and numbers. MSG is a taste enhancer, popular in Asian food, that enhances the flavor of food but can also be a health hazard for many of us. Generally, if something sounds a bit 'iffy', it probably is.

I hope these five guidelines will help you be more aware of your food labels!

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