professional for two decades and currently works at Texas Oncology, has said that sugar spikes cause far more heart disease than the fats that we are so conscious of do. “Western Europeans – Germans, the Polish, the Dutch – all eat far more fats than we do, and yet have far fewer instances of heart disease. We have done studies and what the studies show is that it isn’t the fats that cause heart disease, or not completely. Blood sugar levels spiking causes far more heart disease than the fats we eat.” However, focusing on what is reported in the nutrition label is only a step in the right direction. Nutrition labels are already lacking in space, as most food items do not have a lot of room in the first place. Therefore, instead of increasing
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A large piece of the puzzle is the equalization factor poverty provides to food: when you have little money, it does not matter how healthy the food is, it matters how filling the food is. Nothing, save making healthy food less expensive, will change that, and few ways will cause companies to lower prices en masse. More regulation will not do this – which is why little of the change should be through the government. If anything, we need to lower the bureaucracy involved (while still keeping the same overall guidelines in place to assure safety), which would cause companies to require less overhead. At the same time, if the American people are more conscious of what we eat – and perhaps eat a little less of it, too – we can pressure the food companies into lowering prices so that they do not go out of business, causing them to retain similar profit margins with lower overhead costs and legal …show more content…
The new nutrition labels are but a single step in this direction – they have not changed the overall information displayed, but merely tweaked it. We need to become proficient in reading this information and knowing it well enough to compare it. For instance, if an average apple contains 6 grams of sugar, and a cup of applesauce contains 17, something is clearly wrong with the applesauce. We need to become proficient in comparing products to other similar products. If another brand of applesauce has 8 grams of sugar a cup, it would clearly be a superior choice to the ultra-sugared applesauce cup from
A large piece of the puzzle is the equalization factor poverty provides to food: when you have little money, it does not matter how healthy the food is, it matters how filling the food is. Nothing, save making healthy food less expensive, will change that, and few ways will cause companies to lower prices en masse. More regulation will not do this – which is why little of the change should be through the government. If anything, we need to lower the bureaucracy involved (while still keeping the same overall guidelines in place to assure safety), which would cause companies to require less overhead. At the same time, if the American people are more conscious of what we eat – and perhaps eat a little less of it, too – we can pressure the food companies into lowering prices so that they do not go out of business, causing them to retain similar profit margins with lower overhead costs and legal …show more content…
The new nutrition labels are but a single step in this direction – they have not changed the overall information displayed, but merely tweaked it. We need to become proficient in reading this information and knowing it well enough to compare it. For instance, if an average apple contains 6 grams of sugar, and a cup of applesauce contains 17, something is clearly wrong with the applesauce. We need to become proficient in comparing products to other similar products. If another brand of applesauce has 8 grams of sugar a cup, it would clearly be a superior choice to the ultra-sugared applesauce cup from