Opinion / Readers' Letters

Refining food labelling idea

Re: Count the calories, Editorial Feb. 26

Count the calories, Editorial Feb. 26

It’s an excellent idea for the Ontario Legislature to pass a bill to force restaurants, fast food outlets and stores that sell prepared products to indicate calorie counts. In fact, it may be imperative in reducing rising rates of obesity and health care costs associated with too much weight.

Making decisions about healthy eating is often not as simple as it would appear. Processed or prepared foods can pack in astonishing amounts of fat, sugar and salt in a product that looks small and harmless.

Consumers have a right to know which foods are caloric bombs, and which are healtheir choices. It is not always so obvious.

Sylvia Putz, Toronto

There is one more aspect of the push for calorie counting that renders the whole concept useless. The assumption is made that all calories are equal in their contribution to issues like weight gain. It is simply not true.

If you consume a certain number of calories of a refined food such as bread, it will put more weight on you than the same level of calories contained in animal protein. There is also the ongoing myth that fat makes you fat. It does not. In terms of weight gain, you have more to fear from the refined flour in a muffin than the level of fat yet the fat is where most of the calories originate.

Now if you want to talk about the type of fat contained, that is an important issue.

Rick Tufts, nutritionist, Toronto

We should go farther than just listing salt and sugar levels on menus, we should set reasonable limits.

When my doctor told me to limit my sodium intake, I didn’t think it was a problem because I never sprinkle salt on my food. Who knew the food industry was doing it for me? Who knew the Canadian food packagers were sprinkling way more salt than other countries (In the U.K., an order of McDonald’s nuggets is laced with only 240 milligrams of sodium while in Canada it is infused with 680 milligrams).

Our government regulates alcohol to a certain age group because it may not be handled responsibly by the youngsters and may have a deleterious lifelong impact when misused. It also has the potential to get someone hooked on lifelong unhealthy excesses.

Pot usage is viewed and controlled even more harshly than booze with serious penalties for teens and adults because of possible dangers. Yet, when a single drink contains 14 teaspoons of sugar and a country has a soaring diabetes problem, no one seems to feel some controls are required.

Maybe it is time for a little regulation about food and drink contents in light of all the research that highlights the horrible consequences of hidden sugars and salt to our overall health.

Russell Pangborn, Keswick