Healthy Dieting

To save me having to make endless lists of other foods that contain fats, I’m going to show you how to become a ‘fat sleuth’ — in other words, to empower yourself as a consumer so that you are easily able to detect hidden fat. And how do you do this? By reading the label of everything — and I mean everything — you buy. Here are some important steps:

Analyze the list of ingredients

Recently, it’s become law that manufacturers of food products have to list ingredients on the label. These should be listed in descending order from the largest ingredient to the smallest (although, at present, only some manufacturers and two large supermarket chains fully comply with this requirement).

Take, for example, a standard 340 g tin of three-bean salad. The ingredients are listed as follows:

Water, red kidney beans, butter beans, chickpeas, sugar, sunflower oil, thickener, stabiliser, spices, salt, garlic.

Our tin of beans contains more water than anything else. The smallest ingredient is garlic. But what about the fat? The beans are not fatty (although the words ‘kidney’ and ‘butter‘ are misleading!). Chickpeas, too, are not fats — they are legumes. But keep reading, and you will find the culprit: sunflower oil.

You may be fairly surprised to find that this innocent-looking product contains sunflower oil. (Remember, just because you can’t see it, taste it or smell it doesn’t mean it isn’t there.) The burning question, however, is how much? Half a cup, or just a smidgen? How do you tell?

Well, you can’t tell exactly, but you can have a jolly good guess by analysing the ingredients. Because the list is in descending order according to the amount contained in the recipe, the ingredient listed immediately before sunflower oil is sugar. It’s clear, therefore, that there’s more sugar in the product than there is oil. Now think about the taste of a bean salad. Is it as sweet as a dessert? Or is it not sweet at all, like a steak?

It’s neither. Obviously, then, the product has just enough sugar in it to take the edge off the vinegar taste, but not enough to make it sweet on the palate.

The truth is that there are about two teaspoons of sugar in a tin of three-bean salad. It stands to reason, therefore, that there must be less than two teaspoons of sunflower oil in the tin (because the oil is listed after the sugar). Say, for argument’s sake, that the entire tin contains about two teaspoons of sunflower oil. Since you are hardly likely to eat the entire tin, you can happily conclude that this product is very low in fat — and therefore safe to eat. (Compare this tin with a single egg yolk — the yolk may take up very little room, but it contains a whole teaspoon of fat!)

I have given this example to show that you can estimate how much fat there is in a product in three easy steps:

• Locate the fatty ingredient on the ingredients list.
• Look at the ingredient that is placed directly before it on the list.

• Make an educated guess as to how much of this earlier ingredient the product contains by imagining its taste. (It’s almost impossible to imagine the taste of fats and oils, as often they are tasteless and impossible to detect.)
• Estimate how much fat the product contains (it will contain less than the previous ingredient on the list).

Let’s go back to the three-bean salad. Imagine that sunflower oil is placed directly after butter beans on the list of ingredients. It’s reasonable to assume that a large proportion of the three-bean salad is made up of butter beans. So if sunflower oil is listed straight after them, there must be a substantial amount of oil in the tin.

Go now and have a look at some of the tins, packets, boxes and cartons of foodstuffs in your grocery cupboard, and you may be in for a surprise!

Possibly related posts: (automatically generated)
Eating for Pleasure and Health, how to read “Fat” labels

• Tips making your Lose Wieght plan a Success
• Designing Your Own Dieting Plan
• Eating for Pleasure and Health, how to read “Fat” labels continue...
• 21 Dieting steps to Glowing good Health
• How Fat is Hidden
• Scientific Dieting for Boosting Your Metabolism
• Health Dieting Refresher Course Weekly
• Eating for Health and Pleasure, Slow-Burning Carbohydrates, GI Dieting
• Scientific Dieting for Boosting Your Metabolism continued
• Healthy Eating Keeps you Slim