With food, the marketing companies have spent a lot of time trying to trick the consumer about what they should eat, in order to latch on to any health fads or health information that suddenly becomes popular.
Zero fat is one of those things. At one time, it was considered that fat was the only cause of obesity and everyone began trying to minimise the amount of fat in their diet.
The marketing food companies then decided to market their products as zero fat, less fat or half fat, etc, to try and trick people into thinking the food was healthy.
BUT, what actually happens is, when the companies put zero fat on a product’s label, what they should also be saying is “with a huge amount of sugar added”, because the companies will take out the fat, or minimise the amount of fat in a food product and replace it with large amounts of sugar.
Because a product says zero fat, it does not mean that you don’t need to look at the other ingredients on the label, quite the the contrary.
One of the most important things that we teach, here at the DVCC, is for you to be aware of what you are actually eating, so to read the labels and gain insight into what is really in that food product.
One of the best examples to look at is yogurt. If you look at zero fat yogurt, compared to full fat natural Greek yogurt, you will see that the zero fat product has a large amount of sugar in comparison; they substitute the fat with sugar.
You can tell by the taste, but if you look at the label, you will see a very high amount of carbohydrates, of which most are sugars. Compare this to the full fat product, which has very little sugar content.
To go along with that, the general nutritional facts are now that natural fat, i.e. fat that is naturally within a food, does not cause you to store fat.
It is actually sugar that is the biggest cause of high cholesterol; it has also been linked to cancer and many other diseases, far more so than the natural fat that you ingest in food.
Although it is very important that we define the type of fat that we are talking about; that is the fat that naturally occurs in food, such as the fat in Greek yogurt which we mentioned above, or the fat that is on a grass-fed steak. We cannot compare that to the processed or hydrogenated types of fat that are found in, for example, a deep fat fried burger or fish & chips.
Once again, it is another example of trying to ensure you eat single ingredient foods; if you are eating single ingredient foods, you can be 99% certain that the fat in that food is going to be of the good kind. And you won’t need to look at the label, because there will not be one!
