Low Fat Meals that Aren't

Low Fat Meals that Aren't!

Notice the most prominent writing on this label – “97% fat free” – in large, impossible-to-miss letters. So clearly this must be a healthy, low-fat product. It says so right there on the box!

It also has the tick of approval of the ‘National Heart Foundation’ (bottom left), so it must be good. But as I said before, things are not always (in fact often) what they seem, especially when it comes to some low-fat food options.

Now let’s take a look at the reverse side of the packet and we will discover how misleading some packaging and marketing can be. You may need to really pay attention and put on your thinking cap for the next bit. It’s hard to make out, but the second green line in the nutrition information box says:

Fat, total (2.7% of meal) and we’ve already discovered from the front of the box that this meal is 97% fat-free, so that all stacks up.

However…

What if the formula that these companies use to calculate fat doesn’t really tell us the true story? What if it’s misleading?

When (most) companies calculate the fat percentage of their products they do so based on the weight of those products. For example, if a product weighs 100 grams and it contains 10 grams of fat, then that product is claimed to be 10% fat, or as often is the case, 90% fat-free. If we look at this particular product, we see that it weighs 340 grams and that it contains 9.2 grams of fat – therefore we have a meal which is only 2.7% fat. Or do we?

Now, if the weightof food was the issue (in terms of it’s impact on our body) then they would be right, but when it comes to you or I gaining or losing body-fat, it ain’t about the weight of food we put in our body, it’s about it’s energy density – how many calories that product contains. If it was only about the weight of food, I’d have to give up watermelon ’cause it’s kinda heavy!!

What we need to know to accurately estimate the fat percentage of any food (and therefore it’s potential impact on us) is this:

1. Total calories contained in that meal or product

2. How many of those (total) calories come from fat.

Simply calculate the fat calories as a percentage of the total calories and thenyou’ll get an accurate picture of whether a product truly is low in fat. For example:

The above ‘low-fat’ meal contains a total of 378 calories and we know that it contains 9.2 grams of fat (the nutrition label gives us this info). We also know that one gram of fat contains 9 calories (well, you do now), so by simply multiplying 9.2 (the total grams of fat in this meal) by 9 (the calories per gram of fat) we can calculate that 82.8 of the total calories in this meal come from fat!!

In other words, just under 25% of the calories in this ‘low-fat’ meal are derived from fat!!

Hmmm, no wonder they use the ‘weight’ thing as opposed to the energy density thing. It would be much harder to sell a low-fat meal that was 25% fat wouldn’t it?