“Diet”, “low Fat”, “No Added Sugar”: Don’t be fooled

When it comes to the marketing of food, companies will generally have their bottom line as the top priority and your health a fair way down the list.

That won’t stop them from appealing to your desire to be healthy to try and convince you to buy their product. They do this by using slogans such as “light”, “diet”, “low fat” and my favourite “No Added Sugar”. Let’s take a little look at what these terms really mean.

MARKETTING SLOGAN	TRANSLATION FOR THE ENLIGHTENED	EXAMPLE
Diet	We have another product that is even worse for you than this one.	Diet coke
Low Fat / light	We have removed fat but don’t worry there’s extra sugar in its place.	Low fat yogurt and icecream etc
No Added Sugar	The natural ingedients of this product already have so much sugar, we don’t need to add any more.	Almost all Fruit Juices

More on dairy products: In the case of low fat dairy products it is important to remember that it is the sugar / lactose in dairy that causes a particularly big insulin spike leading to sugar burning instead of fat burning. This is why we recommend dairy be consumed sparingly if fat loss is your goal. This effect occurs with both low fat and full fat dairy. In fact the insulin response is often greater in low fat dairy due to the higher sugar content usually present.

The botton Line: The use of ‘Low fat’, ‘diet’, ‘light’ or ‘no added sugar’ does not mean healthy. In fact alarm bells should sound when you see these words on food packageing. The best way to ensure you’re not being ‘tricked’ by food labelling is simply to stick to fresh produce that typically has no labels. Fruits and veges, meat, poultry and seafood, nuts, seeds will generally all come without labels. A few exceptions such as olive oil, eggs, tinned tuna, snap frozen berries and veges are a few notable exceptions to the ‘don’t buy it if it doesn’t have a label’ philosophy.