Healthy or junk food? Busting food labels (CBC Marketplace)

We're reaching into grocery baskets with eyes focused on popular

food

products investigating whether companies are playing fast and loose when it comes to

food

labeling Start your day with Nutella Everything from breakfast to dinner Application Healthy sounds good, I'm told Finding a Healthy Diet of PL Foods, 100% Natural Vegetable Bread with Vegetables, seems like it's all the rage these days, but are the company's claims backed by fact or is it just food fiction? ? How important are the labeling claims to your decision? That's the first thing I think about. Look, I'm a parent, so I like my kids to know certain types of nutrition, they're still growing, so they need a lot of protein, quite a bit.

I used to not be in the best of health so it became a habit over time to find out about these

healthy

food claims we reviewed and met with a guy who can help us read between the lines hi Yoni hi Erica what good to see you again, good to see you. Dr. Yoni Friedhoff runs a health and nutrition business. center in Ottawa has been called Canada's nutritional watchdog. How would you describe some of the marketing tactics that companies use to get people to buy their products? Well, they will use everything they can to try to convince consumers that what is in those packages is health.

Food, how successful do you think the marketing is? I think it's extremely successful. Every supermarket aisle is praying for us. They are praying for our psychologies. They are praying for our beliefs. No fair, let's start with the first meal of the day. a popular Nutella breakfast product, you know, the one that's spreading the message that breakfast loves Nutella knives spoons fingers and cheeks made with toasted hazelnuts breakfast loves Nala, Chong's precious family loves it too. His 9-year-old son Jack eats this candy three times a day. This week he's crazy about Nutella, delicious. She first ate this when she was a child in Europe and says it is now a staple in her house when you serve her Nutella in the morning.

How much do you give M between a teaspoon and a tablespoon? filled with oats, do you know anything about the ingredients in Nutella? I know it's like hazelnuts and sugar. Any idea how much sugar is in there? I don't know, the manufacturer says it can be part of a balanced breakfast, but is Nutella really good? way to start the day, what do you think of this product? Well, I think they are sweet spreads, because basically everything you spread on that piece of bread is going to be sugar, so how much sugar does Nutella contain? He says each serving is one tablespoon.

So I'm just going to take a tablespoon of this and it has 11 g of sugar. Well, here we go. Nutella is really a little bit of whey powder, so we're going to put in a little bit of whey powder and it's a little bit of skim milk powder. We'll also put in some cocoa powder, we have cocoa powder and now everyone knows that it contains hazelnuts, but I don't know if everyone knows that there are only two and a half hazelnuts in that tablespoon and then there's only a shy gram. less than three teaspoons of sugar, that's a ton of sugar on my toast, there's a lot of sugar on your toast and you know a lot of people who say, well, you know, we know it's un

healthy

, but I'm not sure people know.

How much is all that sugar actually in a single serving and does freeof think people are eating more than that? The label is swimming in Nutella. I wonder if two tablespoons would make it look more like that label and once you do, two tablespoons of Nutella. you're eating 5 and a half teaspoons of sugar and that's not all. You have another ingredient down there. What do I do? This is chocolate frosting. You think there is a comparison. Well, in fact, there is less sugar spoon for spoon in this chocolate frosting. that on Nutella, the company says it does not promote the nutritional value of Nutella.

If you eat it with whole fruit toast and milk, it can be part of a complete breakfast, but that is little consolation for our mom from Toronto. In a serving of Nutella, which is a tablespoon, there are 11 g of sugar, do you know how much is? No it's almost 3 teaspoons it's a lot of sugar so basically I'm giving my son a chocolate bar for breakfast the fact that Nutella is marketed as a breakfast food it's sold only that way and knowing how much sugar contains, how do you feel about it? Oh, I mean, it's a travesty, it shouldn't be a breakfast food, it should be like a dessert, the latest in a long line of unhappy Nutellas. fans a couple of years ago the manufacturer made national news in the US when it was sued for false advertising.

I thought it was at least as nutritious as peanut butter, maybe a little more and that was just the impression I got from the commercial. The company had to pay its clients 3 million dollars. They may have altered their advertising to tone down the impression that it's healthy, but this sugar cop says he's still leaving a false impression of why companies are allowed to market their products as if they're good for business. They are allowed to say what they can say now that they are like teenagers their job is to go further to see what they can do to sell as much of the product as possible one of the mottos of this product is that breakfast loves Nutella well Children They may love Nutella and maybe breakfast too, but I'm not so sure health does.

Let's put this aside. In fact, it's time we turn this label on its head and change food fiction into food reality, so let's make breakfast love Nutella. Nutella loves sugar. with breakfast ready, lunch time, healthy request sounds good, I'm sold, throw it away, so we bought some Campbell's healthy request soup, so when you see the word healthy request, what does that mean to you, uh , it would mean to me. There would be more vegetables in there, um, it would have some type of whole grain, a healthy request. Well, I'd have to look at the ingredients before finding out if it's healthy vegetables and pretty things, so I guess. yeah that's something I would consider so how healthy is this soup so we have this Campbell soup it's called healthy request and there's a lot of health related stuff on this label there's no doubt that the label screams healthy I mean, even if you look at the spoon, you don't see soup, you just see a spoonful of vegetables right above a logo that has a heart with the word healthy above it, so I imagine the marketing point is a healthy soup for the heart, so let's look at the amount of sodium here it's 470 milligrams of sodium per serving, what's that number like?

Well, first, 470 milligrams of sodium in a serving of soup may not be a small amount for someone who is worried and concerned for real reasons about sodium, for people with heart problems. illness, it is actually quite a lot for a serving of soup, but I have a question: how much is the serving of soup? In this case, it says 250 milliliters per serving, but you have almost 400 in this container, so that would be almost 750 milligrams. of sodium in that container if you ate it all now I wonder who wouldn't eat it all. I mean, look at this container, so it's a single-serving container.

I say this because you can't close it again. Campbell says he uses the standard serving size for soup set by the government that way. Buyers can make a fair comparison, but it appears Campbell may be breaking government rules on labeling. If a food product can reasonably be eaten in one sitting, the company has to give you the nutritional information. information for the entire container, how misleading it is then to give the sodium for a portion that is not all. I think it's very misleading, especially when you have a container that is clearly something people would regularly consume in one sitting. and that's not the only food fiction out there, if you want to know how much sodium, it's the same amount of sodium you would get if you ate this whole plate of fries, you wouldn't sit down and eat a whole big bowl of fries like that, No, and if you're making your own vegetable soup at home, the likelihood of you adding that much sodium is pretty low, so this healthy soup you're requesting isn't all that healthy.

At the supermarket, we give shoppers the scoop on this soup. Do you think it's a healthy request? It's terrible, it's terrible. You probably prefer the fries which have a healthy request here. It has so much sodium. Yes, how do you feel about the statement? It doesn't seem healthy at all. It's time for another label makeover. Let's turn Campbell's Healthy Order Soup into Campbell's Savory Order Soup. When we come back, more popular names and marketing plays are this 100% fruit bar, 100% healthy, yeah, that's something I would probably stay away from and later what. clever claims are good for dinner that's what terrible label mistakes are you take a photo and share it with us on Facebook and Twitter Tom and I are moving through the aisles of the supermarket looking for products that claim to be good for what you're dealing with to separate food reality from gastronomic fiction.

We've reviewed breakfast, next on the lunch menu. Oh, here we go. Garden vegetable bread with vegetables with our soup. Perfect combination. Okay, we have vegetable bread from Dempster's garden. What do you think when you look at that label, yeah, well, vegetables, of course, vegetables are good for you, right, I think it should be better for you, it should give you a little more than your daily vegetable intake, so in the kitchen we asked our nutritional watchdog, Dr. Yoni. Friedhoff, the packaging is covered in carrots, what do you suggest? I think it probably suggests to me and most people that that loaf of bread has a lot of carrots in it.

Carrots have many nutrients, so what is Dempster known for serving carrots? your vitamin A, let's see how much vitamin A is here per serving. It says one serving is two slices and you would get 6% of your recommended daily amount of vitamin A. How much is that in terms of an actual carrot? It's actually not much, so if you really wanted to get your vitamin a from a carrot. Get a real vegetable. The amount of carrot you would need to eat meat is a little over a gram of carrot, which I guess is about that, so I think it's pretty misleading.

It's very misleading and I think what it really means is that when you put vegetables in a food, the processing removes their nutrients. Eating a carrot is not the same as eating carrots that were put in processed foods, even if a lot of them are put there. nutrition is eliminated Dempster says that two slices of his garden vegetable bread have half a serving of vegetables, but after processing there are not many vitamins, so if you ate the entire loaf of this bread, how much carrot would you get for a medium size? carrot, it would be about a seventh of the carrot if I ate the whole loaf of bread, so much vitamin A, that's right.

Dster says the label is factually accurate, but our grocery shoppers are still frustrated with that small amount of vitamins they would have to eat. the whole loaf to get the vitamin A equivalent of the carrot, that big, that seems like a lie, the immediate reaction is like oh, because you made me put a big thing on the front that says garden vegetables and those are vegetables. that would have vitamin A. I think that's pretty misleading to me, that's misleading, so the actual amount of vitamin A in this bread gets an F, yeah, an F for food fiction.

It's time for another label change. Let's turn Dempster's garden vegetable bread into dster where's the? The next vegetable on our shopping list we're on the hunt for a mid-afternoon snack. The supermarket aisles these days are filled with food

labels

making all kinds of claims about fruits. Look at those 100% fruits. Look at this one made by Sunripe. It's called fruit. Source 100.% fruit bars, how can you go wrong? These are the things that go in lunch boxes and, you know, things like that, if you see 100% fruit, then you would think okay, it's like an apple or it's like an orange or a pear or It's time to find out if this bar of fruit is as good for you as you think if we look at the nutritional information 29g of sugar in each bar so how much sugar is it?

Well, the amount of sugar in each of these bars is the same amount of sugar that you would get if you ate 1 2 four five six and a half Oreos and I don't think many parents would send their kids off with six and a half Oreos of sugar. to school every day and they would think that was healthy, well you would never do that. Parents think this is a healthy alternative, not 6 and a half sugar Oreos, that's right. Shoppers are surprised that there is so much sugar in one bar, just one of these bars has 29g of sugar. equivalent to 6 and a half Oreos, yeah that's something I would probably stay away from.

It would be surprising to me if there is so much. I would rather have the 6 and 1 12 Oreo cookies that we call ripe and said that this product is derived 100% from fruit and I believe that the fruitstarted your processing chain correctly. This is a processed food and processing the fruit changes its nutrition. This again is candy disguised as fruit that is still candy. Now maybe you know all that. The sugar in this fruit bar is natural and builds up once it's processed, but do you get the good stuff too? Strawberries are known for their vitamin C, so let's see per bar how much vitamin C you get and it says 2% of your daily amount.

It's not a lot, so if you ate a strawberry MH and wanted to get the same amount of vitamin C from those bars, you would have to eat six of them. The truth is, I think the only thing we should be able to do is real fruit. the not-so-sweet facts demand another label makeover given all that sugar, let's call it Sun rpe Sun hype when we're back to being a popular pasta with a clever twist that takes advantage of people's hope and it's your turn to give your opinion to food manufacturers just be honest hey watchdogs have a product you think we should try email us at

marketplace

cbc.ca we're scanning the supermarket aisles for popular products for claims of Misleading marketing, we've reviewed breakfast, lunch and afternoon tea, so what's for dinner? smart artisan dinner, yes, craft has launched a line of products to appeal to health conscious parents, it's called KD smart with high fiber vegetables, even one with omega3 sure sounds healthy, artisanal, smart on the inside, it has flax Omega omega3, so you see that kind of label, what do you think?

I see flax, which I know is good for me. I see omega-3, which as someone with high omega 3 blood pressure I think I should have that Do you think this is a healthier alternative to regular KD? I think so, I'm just referring to Omega 3 flax um no artificial flavors, colorings, preservatives. Here's an unappetizing fact, all three smart brands cost more than regular KD, so what exactly do you get for that higher price? We asked nutrition expert Dr. Yon, without starting with smart Katie with greens in the ingredients, she says she has freeze-dried cauliflower, so how much do you get in each serving?

It's not much, I mean. this is artisanal and if you do the numbers you want to see how much, for example, the vitamin C value of cauliflower you will get in one serving, it's 2 tablespoons, that's just an eighth of a cup, yes, for each serving of this KD, smart About a third of the box you get the vitamin C found in 2 tablespoons of cauliflower. The other brand they have here is Craft Inner Smart High Fiber and the ingredient says this contains total fiber. How much do we get in each serving of This means you're getting the amount of fiber equivalent to consuming about one apple, and in theory that sounds great, except that eating fruits, vegetables, and whole grains has health benefits.

We don't have the same amount of evidence to suggest that if you take just the fiber out of those foods and add it to KD, that will suddenly make KD healthy. I think it's overkill, finally, KD smart with omega-3 with flax there is enough in the box to make a difference in your health. omega-3, are you getting this right? So the evidence on omega-3s suggests that the best sources of omega-3s are fish sources and our bodies actually convert flax into the same types that you would get from fish, but we do it very inefficiently.

So how much KD Smart would you need to eat to get the omega-3 you would get in this piece of fish? Try 177 servings. This is not healthy food. You know, if people want to eat a craft dinner, they eat a craft dinner. of children's rights, but to do it and think you're being smart about it, well, that's food fiction. Supermarket shoppers think that what we find is difficult to digest. We did some calculations on this. Yes, you would have to have 177. servings about 44 boxes of this to get the Omega-3 that you get from one serving of salmon.

Wow, that's some smart marketing. HH, what is is, is what is. I think it is really selling very little to the consumer. In terms of what they're actually looking to get out of these products, you call it misleading, why do you think it's misleading? Because they say it is a smart choice to eat and it is not, it is not artisanal, it admits that there are not a large amount of nutrients. value with this trio but says they're an option for parents parents with picky kids we've decided your marketing is too clever so bring on a new label ktie smart say hello to not so smart KD Dr.

Yoni freedhoff says the buck should stop at As the government needs to take more responsibility to ensure that food

labels

are not misleading, we should not be forced, as consumers, to study nutritional labels to see if the claims on the front are accurate. For allowing the claims we see on these packages to exist, we first asked the government agency responsible for ensuring these products are not misleading for an on-camera interview about our findings. No luck, we want to talk to all companies. on camera about this food fiction too but they say no, food manufacturers may not be talking but we know you have something to tell them, be honest you don't have to go through this, people will still buy your product if they like , they probably sell their product just as well if you weren't participating in this activity and you are probably losing a certain segment of the market like me, they are enticing us to buy what they have, or we need to change the laws. about what they can say or we as consumers have to be more educated, we really have to be more, I think, more deliberate in putting the actual ingredients more in the foreground instead of more transparent, more transparent instead of the word of fashion that people seem to be catching on to. you're eating it too, you're also feeding your kids this stuff, you know it's time to change and that's a food label.

Cleaning the grocery aisle next week on Marketplace. Do you want to donate to love breing? Look at the charity that is donating to a good cause, would you like to donate $2 to com? So how come we don't always feel good about doing it as soon as I see there's a campaign? I think oh brother, here we go again while the stores rake in millions. We have left. to ask what they gain from this they don't tell you that there is no responsibility in the box some believe there is a better and different way give me your reason for doing it Beyond feeling good doing good but feeling bad that's next week