Tuesday, February 24, 2009

My food...My choice

Don't ask me why I read labels on my food and drinks. I haven't a clue. Maybe I think I'll find something good in the bad or discover that one special ingredient I'm missing from my USDA vitamin list.

Total Cereal has a great label. They are telling you that you have no reason to read their label. In huge letters, it says, 100% of what you need today. Quick, easy and allows me to finish my comics instead of looking up what the heck Niacin is.

I'm wincing at the makers of anything "fruity" in their drinks. I keep seeing,"This contains 2% REAL fruit juice. TWO percent? I get more juice chewing on my watermelon flavored Hubba Bubba gum than when I drink 8 ounces of their liquid. (Hubba Bubba..ANYONE?...ANYONE?)

Enough of this labeling. Let's just call it what it is. If you order a Double Whopper with cheese, don't expect anything but a big label in block letters stating,

"Eat more than 10 of these in a month will lower your life expectancy by five years less than if you ordered the single Whopper. Order the large fries along with it and you will live one day less than if you went to Wendy's and ordered a Double Baconator."

It is that simple.

Forget marketing the healthy and non-healthy labels to us. We are smarter than that I hope. Just tell us our life expectancy on each thing we eat and let us choose our own path. If I want to know the carbs/protein ratio of a energy bar, then so be it. What I truly want to know is this peanut butter and chocolate equivalent of a Milky Way will give me enough energy until I can have another salty nut energy bar with chocolate and peanut butter. I'm kinda easy like that.

At Denny's: The equivalent of a Grand Slam Breakfast or a Fruit bowl with yogurt. Hmmmm, I don't even care of the price, (they are both $3.99) I just want to know does one allow me to live to see my grandkids graduate high school or long enough to see another election year.

My decision: So leave me be with the nutritional labels.

This is not about eating right. This is about wanting to know what choices I am making before I make them. The irony is that WE ALL know what is good and bad before we choose. We always have.

We just use their labels to help US help ourselves. Low fat doesn't mean it isn't inundated with sugar. Cholesterol free doesn't mean it doesn't have fat. High in Protein doesn't mean its not high in sodium. There is a reason there are millions of blogs, books and articles about eating right...NO one can tell you what you already know.

We choose the Whopper cause it tastes good. We choose the salad because we had the whopper yesterday. We choose the "NUTRITION" bar cause it looks like a Snickers Bar. We choose the Vitamin Water cause it says, VITAMINS, not cane sugar, crystalline fructose, citric acid, caffeine and ester gum extract as its label.

....and I? I choose to write early in the morning because Wendy's isn't open until 11am.

1 comment:

Bonnie S said...

Awesome! If we don't eat it straight from the ground, the cow, the chicken, or the tree, than we probably shouldn't be eating it, so it is frustrating to even look at those labels. And I have heard California is the only place in the country you can legal purchase raw milk...:P I think the government wants to kill us all.