Eating for Pleasure and Health, how to read “Fat” labels continue…

Read the nutritional content tables

These tables, printed on the labels of many foods, offer consumers a quick and easy way of detecting fats in food, and are probably your most powerful tool in the quest for fat-free eating! Unfortunately, only some local manufacturers and two major supermarket chains (Woolworths and Pick ‘n Pay) include these tables on their products.

These tables usually show the nutritional breakdown of the food per 100 g of product, showing the proportion of carbohydrates, proteins, sugar, fats, and so on. For the purposes of the X Diet, you can ignore all the food groups except the fats.

The golden rule of fat-detecting is:

There should be less than 3 g of fat per 100 g of product.

Any food that contains less than 3 g fat per 100 g can, for the purposes of the X Diet, be considered ‘fat free‘. Now, as I mentioned earlier, I am shamelessly telling a fib here. Even if a product contains only a single gram of fat per 100 g, it clearly still contains some fat, and cannot therefore be ‘fat free‘.

But, as I explained earlier, I do not know of any natural foodstuff that does not contain at least a tiny amount of fat, and so it would be virtually impossible from a medical point of view to say that anything is truly free of fat.

I therefore humbly apologise for telling a fib. But, as far as the X Diet is concerned, 3 g of fat per 100 g of product is as ‘close as dammit’ to being truly fat free.

Check the serving size

A very common mistake that my patients make is to misread the serving size. For example, the label on a bottle of ‘lite’ blue cheese dressing states that the product has 1,7 g of fat. The shopper happily buys the product, safe in the knowledge that it will help her slim down. After all, the back label carries the endorsement of a popular slimming club and the front label bears the stamp of a health foundation! Even the colours of the label are pale, clear and `lite’! The shopper pours the dressing all over her salads for a few weeks — and cannot understand why she hasn’t lost a gram of fat!

If she had looked at the serving size on the label, she would have noticed that the product contains 1,7 g of fat per 15 g of product. This translates to 12 g of fat per 100 g, which is hardly ‘low’ in fat!

The moral of the story? Always check that the serving size is 100 g. Marketing wizards will do anything to con you into buying their product.

Use the consumer advice lines

If the food you are buying doesn‘t have a nutritional content table or list of ingredients, look on the label for a toll-free number that you can dial for customer advice. If the company is worth its salt, the person on the other end of the line will be able to give you the fat content of the product. And don’t forget to ask her why her company has neglected to print nutritional details on the label! It’s about time that all food manufacturers adopt this international practice.

Don’t worry about types of fat

Please do not get confused by all the different types of fat that may be listed on an ingredient. These may include saturated fat, polyunsaturated fat and monounsaturated fat, or even such fancy terms as like ‘partially hydrogenated vegetable fats‘. From the point of view of someone who suffers from high cholesterol, and who doesn‘t have an obesity problem, monounsaturated fat is undoubtedly the right choice, but the same can’t be said for someone who has Syndrome X.

When following the X Diet, you need to concentrate on total fats, and you need not split hairs about whether these are animal or plant fats. Remember, all fats make you fat!

Avoid making assumptions

A rule of thumb with label-reading is never to take anything for granted. Products you assume are fat-free are probably not. And delicious foods that you thought must contain loads of fat actually don’t. A good example is a popular brand of chocolate flavoured milk mix, which is fat free. Some instant vanilla and chocolate puddings are also fat free, provided that they are made up with fat-free milk. Patients are always pleasantly surprised when I tell them that creamed sweetcorn is fat free (even though it doesn‘t say ‘fat free‘ on the label). The same applies to baked beans in tomato sauce — yes, the ones our mothers gave us as a quick meal. They don’t advertise themselves as being ‘fat free because they don’t have to: they never had any fat in them in the first place. Most chutneys, ketchups, soya sauces and American mustards are also fat free. Once again, just because food is part of a diet doesn‘t mean to say that it has to taste like diet food.

Now that you know how to read labels, all you need do is spend two to three hours on your virgin flight through the supermarket as a newly qualified fat-sleuthing whizz. You’ll be amazed at how many delicious fat-free products are available.

Happy hunting!

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