Whether you are recovering from heart disease, trying to reach and maintain a healthy weight, or simply consider yourself a smart shopper, you probably make an effort to reduce unhealthy fats from your diet. That’s great, but keep in mind that food manufacturers may disguise some unhealthy high-fat foods as perceived low-fat foods in order to win your dollars.
Disguise a high fat food as a low-fat food? Isn’t that false advertising? Alas; it happens all the time. But before we get into that, let’s start with a quick review on how to properly read a nutrition panel for fat content.
When determining how high a food is in fat, there are two numbers to look at on the nutrition panel: the number of calories per serving, and the number of these calories that comes from fat. Once you have these two numbers, it’s easy to do the division to determine the percentage of calories in that food that comes from fat.
For example, 100 grams of cooked lentils contains 116 calories, and three of these calories come from fat. Divide 3 by 116 and you’ll find that lentils are 3 percent fat. Similarly, 100 grams of roasted skinless chicken breast contains 165 calories, and 32 of those calories come from fat. So, roasted, skinless chicken is 19 percent fat (32 divided by 165). Easy enough, right?
Now take a look at two-percent milk. One would expect that after doing the math, the percentage of calories in two-percent milk derived from fat would be…two! But the numbers on the nutrition panel indicate otherwise. 100 grams of two-percent milk contain 50 calories, and 18 of these calories come from fat. So, two-percent milk is actually 36 percent fat.
To understand how this can be possible, imagine a glass of water. It contains 0 calories, right? Now imagine a pat of butter that contains 100 calories. And how many of these calories come from fat? All of them or 100 percent, right? Now, let’s pretend to mix this pat of butter into the glass of water. Our drink is now 100 calories, and all of these calories come from fat, right? So, that makes our drink 100 percent fat as a percentage of total calories.
However! The pat of butter (the fat) in our drink is very light, and if one were to measure the weight of the fat in the drink relative to the weight of the water in the drink, one could make the argument that only two percent of the drink comes from fat. So, hypothetically speaking, our 100 percent fat drink could be labeled as being only two percent fat.
That’s how one- and two-percent fat milk and milk products are labeled – by weight rather than as a percentage of total calories. And that’s misleading.
Here’s another example of displaying the percentage of fat in a food by weight rather than as a percentage of total calories: 95 percent lean ground beef. Care to take a guess as to the percentage of fat in 95 percent “lean” ground beef? Don’t say five percent! Do the math. 100 grams of 95-percent lean ground beef, broiled, contains 171 calories, and 59 of these calories come from fat. Voila! That’s 35 percent fat.
Truly savvy shoppers don’t fall for misleading claims, especially when it comes to the consumption of saturated animal fat, directly associated with increased heart disease, many forms of cancer, excess weight, and diabetes type II. Bottom line? Assume that everything written on the front panel of a package is sheer marketing ballyhoo and trust only the nutrition facts panel for the, well, facts!
Nutrition Facts Source: Nutrition Data Database from the USDA National Nutrient Database for Standard Reference.
Maribeth Abrams, MS is a Certified Nutritionist, Certified Lifestyle Educator, and author of two cookbooks loaded with “cheezey” non- dairy recipes. She has been dairy-free for nearly 20 years and is the mother of two teens dairy-free since conception. Please refer to issue August 2011 issue for Maribeth’s article on how dairy consumption promotes osteoporosis. See ad on page 25.