Read The Label
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Having worked in Public Relations and Marketing for almost a decade, I’m a little embarrassed to admit that I got duped by marketing. How you ask? Because I trusted the marketing on the label instead of reading the ingredients for myself. Sometimes I just want to grab my groceries and go. Reading labels takes time and when I’m shopping with two rowdy boys, I have a limited amount of time before someone starts opening the bananas, throws a temper tantrum or bites. (Yes, I have a biter. Let me know if you have any advice on that one).
So a few months back when we started our healthier nutrition plan, I threw away all of my vegetable oil, canola oil, etc. I cook exclusively with coconut oil and flavor my food (including my salads) with olive oil. That’s it. So when I was having a big dinner party for a Girls Night In I decided to look for an oil and vinegar salad dressing I could put out instead of trying to make a triple batch of my own version. I thought I found it. It was Newman’s Own All Natural Olive Oil and Vinegar dressing. I grabbed two bottles and everyone enjoyed it including me. I continued to buy it and was loving it. The bottled dressing was much faster than mixing my own and it tasted just as good. Then one night, I hosted a Health Party with Dr. Jana (I’ll write about that sometime…it was fascinating) I asked Dr. Jana if she had tried the dressing and she suggested I read the ingredients. When I did I was disappointed, but not shocked, to find the second ingredient was canola oil. So I hadn’t found olive oil and vinegar dressing. I had found, olive oil, canola oil and vinegar dressing. Bummer…it was back to my big bottle of oil and vinegar and mixing to taste. But it reminded me that you can never trust the marketing on the package. If you want to know what you’re eating you have to read the ingredients.
I challenge you to pull one thing from your pantry that you buy because you think it’s healthy and read the ingredients. Hopefully you’ll find that you were right. But I’m guessing a lot of you will find ingredients like refined sugar, high fructose corn syrup, hydrogenated oils, white or bleached flour or a host of long words you can’t pronounce, which basically means it’s probably not as good as the marketing on the box says it is.
I’ll leave you with a quote (edited to keep this PG) from a book I’m really enjoying right now…Skinny (rhymes with witch). Authors Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin write, “It doesn’t matter how many calories or fat grams something has….You don’t need the government’s recommended daily allowances to tell you how to eat. Just read the ingredients. If they are healthy, wholesome, and pure – dive in. If there is refined sugar, white or bleached flour, hydrogenated oils, any animal products, artifical anything, or some scary-lookig word that you don’t know – don’t eat it. We can’t make it any simpler. Just read the ingredients and completely ignore all the other gibber jabber…”
Olive Oil, Canola Oil and Vinegar
