Alternative Foods

How many times a year do you say, "I'm gonna get into shape and eat right!" From there you go to your favorite supermarket and spend twice as much time reading labels in order to reduce your carbohydrate, fat, or sodium intake. Do you actually know what you are looking for? Do you understand what the tongue twister words listed in the ingredients mean, let alone pronounce them.

Let's take butter for example. Butter is known to be high in saturated fat and is loaded with cholesterol so by hearing this we immediately decide to look for an alternative. The butter alternative is margarine. Even some brands of margarine will claim to be heart healthy, low fat and contain no trans fats. Some brands actually print this on the label then they also print in the ingredients something which totally contradicts their claim: "monoglycerites." Since this is a word not normally used in my vocabulary I initiated a little research to find out what it meant: "trans fats!" Trans fats are the worst type of fat to feed our body. Trans fats will coat your arteries with so much plaque it will eventually cause a heart attack from a clog or even stroke if some of this plaque decides to start moving. Sticking moderately to real butter is far better.

My thing is cream for my coffee. For years I've been buying fat free creamer. Now that I think of it, I should have been savvy to lie from the beginning by reading, "fat free creamer." That's like saying, "wet-less water." Just recently I decided to pull out my glasses and read what actually is in the ingredients of my fat free creamer: mono and dyglycerides which are other words for "trans fats." Kind of ridiculous don't you think? A little hint to stick to moderation of the real stuff maybe?

What's happening here is these brands are capitalizing on our fears and manufacturing fat and legally calling it something else. The government does nothing about it because not enough evidence is there to prove their manufactured fats are killing people and or they have not been sued by a good lawyer forcing them to actually call it fat within their ingredients.

It goes back to moderation of the real stuff. Us being a fast food nation has cause us to believe the alternatives are better. And the manufacturers of these alternatives are profiting on our stupidity. They are betting we never read or research their ingredients and up to now, they are winning that bet.