It’s not your fault: 7 food lies that fool you

Part of the audacious marketing scam food makers have put together is to use catchphrases to fool you into thinking they have your good health in mind.

Here are just a few of the ones I’m sure you’ve seen. There are many more:

• Coca-Cola trumpets the need for an “active balanced lifestyle.”
• McDonald’s urges a “balanced active lifestyle”
• General Mills promotes “a balanced and healthy lifestyle”
• Pepsico advocates “a balanced lifestyle.”
• Unliver declares that the answer for health is “a balanced diet and lifestyle.”
• Mars is in favor of a “well balanced lifestyle.”
• Nestle’s has become the advocate for “a balanced lifestyle.”

It sounds like reasonable advice: Lead a “balanced” lifestyle for better health. But consider the source.

Big food companies have hijacked the word balanced, according to Yoni Freedhoff, a professor at University of Ottawa, Department of Family Medicine. It’s an effort to deflect blame for health problems from their nutrient-depleted processed foods to try to make it out to be your fault if you’re not healthy. But it’s not your fault. They’re so good at fooling us that even doctors get caught up in it.

It’s no coincidence that the language used by all these corporations is so similar. They’re all after the same goal – to sell you more processed food. Their marketing messages are designed to convince you that their products can be part of a “balanced” lifestyle.

What does their “balanced” lifestyle entail? Eating their processed food and drink, which was never part of the human diet, ever. How can that help you “balance” your “lifestyle”? It can’t. It’s an advertisement to get you to live the lifestyle they want you to live.

Consider what Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, has said about the diabetes and obesity epidemic that soft drinks, including Pepsi, have helped to produce: “There’s no question that sedentary lifestyles have caused the obesity crisis to get out of control.”

What she leaves out is the huge role played by high-fructose corn syrup, the main sweetener in soda.

If you go online to look for the nutrition advice offered by these companies, you find colorful newsletters that seem to contain reliable nutrition help. But dig deeper, and you find they promote products like Memento, a drink that includes hydrogenated oil – a form of trans fat linked to cancer and heart disease.

That Nestle’s newsletter claims that Memento is a “guilt free beverage.” But like many of these products, it’s not part of being healthy.

Big companies bank on the fact that you won’t give up sugary drinks. The good news is, you don’t have to. Drinking a soda once in a while isn’t going to kill you. But what will lead to disease and infirmity later in life is if you don’t look at the source of the “health” information that accompanies these products and take it with a grain of salt.

NONE of these processed products are healthy or natural. As long as you keep that in mind, you’re ahead of the game!

Also, if you give them a chance, you might find that there are other sweet drinks that are better than soda. Tea with honey is my choice. Is there anything that tastes better than honey? Plus you can still get some caffeine. And green tea has almost unlimited health benefits for you.

My friend, Dr. Mark Wiley says that you can drink as much as you want … in fact more is better in this case