Healthy Food Chart

Let’s take a look behind the words and the pretty packaging and after reading this you’ll be able to spot those food marketing cons in a jiffy!

The ‘our products are made with love’ food marketing con

Let’s take simple old icecream – everyone favourite, something we all love to eat, but know we shouldn’t. The last tub I picked up claimed: “hand churned icecream (really? honestly?)… made to good old fashioned standards.” – Well in my mind’s eye I can almost see old Mother Hubbard, apron round her waist, beautific smile on her dial, bun in her hair stirring away infusing my icecream with her love and care.

Hardly likely! The only hands that will be doing any churning are those money grubbing ones as they head to the bank with your bucks. But it sure sounds like their icecream is made with love and sealed with a kiss and something your mother would have made you. And implied in this is: “we really care about you.” BS – what they really care about is their bottom line.

The ‘we’re all natural’ food marketing con

Another favourite of mine is packaging that send out a loud: “all natural grain” message. And that part, the part that’s splashed around for you to nice might well be true… But here’s the rub …what they aren’t saying is that the msg, flavourants and colourants and tartrazine (these of course are hidden in the small print) then added are about as far from natural as are Dolly Parton’s mammaries. Nor do they point out that in the process of getting these ‘natural grains’ into the crisps they now are, they used hydrogenated oils which are just downright toxic for our bodies. All natural? Think again.

What food marketers would have us believe and what is actually true are miles apart.

The ‘fortified with..x,y or z vitamin’ food marketing con

Here’s another fabulous food marketing con that you often see on those fabulous-sounding breakfast cereals, many which have enough sugar to sink a battle ship: “fortified with” followed by a list of vitamins. Nice! Sounds good and healthy. But what these food marketers aren’t telling you is that during processing (read taking food from a natural form and making it into something way more unnatural), they first stripped this now fabulously processed food of about 15 nutrients in their natural form and then added back a few in a form that your body isn’t always even capable of digesting.

But they sure have a way of making it sound like they’re doing you a massive favour. The only favour is to their bottomline as we swoop up these so-called health products believing their bunch of baloney.

The ‘your eyes deceive you’ food marketing con

Oh… and let’s not talk even go to the the names they give their products. Ever seen ‘Heath bars’? Which our eyes read as ‘Health bars’…. and no, it’s not that their spelling sucks – it’s all just ways of conning us into believing they care about our health. They care about one thing and one thing only…how quickly you open your wallet.