What is healthy? As this topic is mentioned, it’s simple enough to say that it involves eating your fruits and vegetables, whole grains, exercising, with occasional consumption of sweets and greasy foods. But according to the FDA, nutrition is constantly evolving and that the “healthy” labeling on food packaging needs to stay up to date. People have their own ways of defining healthy, some will think a serving of tomato sauce in pasta will be a serving of veggies, while others will beg to differ due to the ingredients containing added sugar and loads of sodium. On my previous blog “Sugar Coated Truth”, it is finally revealed that sugar might be the main culprit of gaining excess fat.
Back in 1994 the term “healthy” was focused on low fat content. As long as the food is low in saturated fat, sodium and cholesterol, while having some of the beneficial vitamins and minerals, it can be labeled as “healthy”. So it is easy to say that Frosted Flakes is a healthy food because it is low in fat and fortified with vitamins and minerals while avocados are not healthy because it is high in fat. Although sugar is the rediscovered cause of the health epidemics that we are having in America, not enough nutrition education is being given to consumers to differentiate just how much or how little is good or bad. People need to be aware of the change, some may not be interested but for the consumers that thought their once “healthy” snack such as “Kind” bars, may be deemed as an unhealthy product. The FDA is changing the food nutrition labeling and highlighting on the sugar contents. People need to develop the habit of looking at the nutrition labeling. Information can be found in FDA or Myplate.com, It is important to know what you put in your body, as packaging advertisement can be very misleading.