Food Labels That Lie

Welcome to Kelly the Nurse. This video is about lying labels. It is imperative that you look at your labels before you purchase your food to look them up and see how much sodium is in there. But you don't look at the front of the label.

Labels on the front of foods have no nutritional value whatsoever. They have marketing. This on the front is marketing. It's the commercial for the food. So, they're going to make these foods sound as healthy as they can. They can put words like low sodium. They can put words like light. They can put words like healthy choice.

Now, this is a soup. I have a lot of patients that purchase these soups all the time. They're showing me and I'm saying, no, no, look at the labels on the back. So, this healthy, I want to go like this. this healthy choice soup is so high in sodium that I literally covered up the label by putting my salt shakers. That's how high in sodium. Every single one of these salt shakers represents a hundred milligrams of sodium. So this healthy chicken noodle soup is anything but healthy if you are looking at your salt and needing to follow your low salt diet.

Things like peanut butter and they'll say words like natural or these labels say things like simple truth or organic. These labels mean nothing. When you want to look at the foods that you're eating, you turn and twist the food and look at the food label itself. What you're not looking at is the percentage of sodium in the food. I hear from patients all the time, well that's not high in sodium, it's only 13%. Well, 13 % of what? The percentage of sodium is based on a diet that people who have heart disease cannot follow. It's too high in sodium.

In other words, I can have more sodium in my diet and get away with it for now in my 50s than I can later in my 70s or 80s or 90s. By that time, you're needing to watch your sodium. So, please know that when you're selecting foods for yourself or for your family members, please do not rely on this label. This is marketing. It's designed to make you get the food. It doesn't tell you the information that you must have. So, we have a saying here with my patients, we turn and twist.

So, all the time I'm asking patients, turn and twist the foods you buy and look at two things number one the serving size a little chicken noodle soup like this could be one serving when I saw this on the shelf I thought okay that's a serving so let me grab it this is two and a half servings of chicken noodle soup so the amount the serving size can be very misleading you pick something up and think that's a serving well it's not if you look on the back the serving size is a very small amount. So you look at the serving size. You look number two at the milligrams per serving. So this organic tomatoes one serving size is half a cup and it's 200 milligrams.

The other thing to watch for and I brought this with my little corns and green beans. Canned vegetables are perfectly acceptable if you buy the very few kinds that don't have a lot of salt but don't be fooled no salt added does not mean there's no sodium in this can so when you turn and twist the label which I have to do right now so that I can read it you turn and twist and one half a cup of these particular this particular brand of green beans is 10 milligrams of sodium well that's negligible please Please purchase this food, but be careful to look at the labels because sometimes words like organic, low sodium, lightly salted, simple truth, those types of labels are to get you to purchase the food.

So please turn and twist and make sure that what's on this label matches the food label and in this particular green bean it does. Now, to talk a little bit about this particular brand, Del Monte No Sodium Added. As far as I know, they have green beans, corn, and peas in the low or the no salt added. And you're going to save quite a bit of sodium, 10 milligrams for half a cup versus over here that is 380 milligrams in this one.

So something that says fresh cut green beans sounds very healthy. Not really if you say that one half a cup of these green beans has 380 milligrams of salt. I don't know about you, but there's a lot of different foods that I would rather have to spend 380 milligrams of my total budget, my total day allotment of 2 ,000. I'd rather spend 380 on something a lot better than canned green beans. So, when it comes to canned vegetables in general, look to Del Monte, but look very carefully only for their no salt added and just to be sure, you turn and twist the label on every single food. Do not look at percentage, that's for younger, healthier people. You look at the serving size and the milligrams per serving.

When you're looking at food labels, you're going to do math, simple math, addition and subtraction. You're not going to deal with percentages. You're going to simply say, this has 200 milligrams, I'm allowed 2 ,000 for the day, I'm going to eat that serving size that's listed, keep track that I'm 200 milligrams down so that I have 1 ,800 left for the rest of the day. That's how we follow food labels. That's how you follow your sodium. And that's how you understand and know that something that says light could have as much as 260 milligrams and 2 tablespoons.

Thank you for watching. This is Kelly, the nurse.