Top Food Goofs (Part-Two)

Here are 5 more top food goofs that we all make:

1. If it has vitamins, it must be good for me.

It started 40 years ago with breakfast cereals ("fortified with 8 vitamins and iron"), Wonder Bread ("helps build strong bodies 12 ways!"), and sugary kids drinks like Hi-C and SunnyD ("100% vitamin C"). Now vitamins are also being added to cereal bars, energy and granola bars, and sugary drinks for adults. And we keep falling for it.

2. It's okay to judge a food by its reputation.

Face it. We think of some foods as healthy - or at least acceptable - even though they're no better than foods we would never touch. A few examples: * Chocolate soy milk. Would you drink a glass of ordinary chocolate milk? Never.  A cup of low-fat chocolate milk has 160 calories and 6 teaspoons of sugar (roughly half of which is the naturally occurring lactose in the milk). Chocolate Silk has 140 calories and 5 teaspoons of sugar per cup (about half of it added).

* Muffins. No way you'd ever eat doughnuts. Muffins, on the other hand.... Yet at Dunkin' Donuts, a yeast doughnut like a Chocolate Frosted has 270 calories, 3 teaspoons of sugar, and 7 grams of saturated fat. (A cake doughnut is worse.) A Dunkin' Chocolate Chip Muffin? Try 610 calories, 14 teaspoons of sugar, and 7 grams of sat fat.

3. I didn't get the memo.

"Natural." "Made with Real Fruit." You see those and similar words on labels all the time. What you may not realize is that they're part of a code that the food industry and the FDA have agreed on. Sometimes, the label explains the code in tiny type. Most of the time, you're just supposed to know. Here's a decoder:

* Made with whole grain. Only some of the grain is whole.

* Made with real fruit. Made with a little fruit (and it's probably mostly grape, apple, or pear juice anyway).

* Naturally flavored. Whether it's naturally or artificially flavored, you get little or none of what the flavoring makes you think is in the food.

* Omega-3. Contains the omega-3 fats in fish oil (EPA and DHA), the omega-3 fatin flax, soy, and canola oil (ALA), or both. The evidence is much stronger that EPA and DHA lower the risk of heart disease, but most "omega-3" foods have only ALA.

4. Calories don't count if. . .

Calories don't count if you eat standing up, you eat off someone else's plate, you're just straightening the edges of a pie or cake, the refrigerator door is still open, or you eat really quickly. Or so we'd like to believe.

But even reality-oriented shoppers sometimes fool themselves. A case in point: toppings for frozen yogurt.

Let's say you start with just 200 to 300 calories' worth of frozen yogurt. (That's a medium or regular at places like Red Mango, Pinkberry, or TCBY.)

But then the toppings call out. Forget the chocolate chips (80 calories per scoop), the gummy bears (80), and the Oreo pieces (60). Even the "healthy" toppings like granóla (60 calories), nuts (100), and "yogurt" chips (100) pile on the calories.

5. All organic foods are good for you.

Recently, University of Michigan researchers showed 114 students a label from either ordinary Oreos or (fictitious) Oreos "made with organic flour and sugar." Then the researchers asked: "Compared to other cookie brands, do you think that 1 serving of these Oreo cookies contains fewer calories or more calories?" Sure enough, the students were more likely to think that the organic Oreos had fewer calories.1

In a second experiment, students were asked about Susie, a hypothetical 20-yearold sorority member who was trying to lose weight. "Would it be ok for her to skip her usual three-mile run after dinner to spend more time on school work?" the students were asked.

The participants were more likely to say "yes" when told that Susie's dinner (roasted vegetables over brown rice) had finished with a small bowl of organic ice cream or an organic cookie than if the desserts were not described as organic.

How many people buy Organic NewmanO's when they'd never buy Oreos, Whole Foods 365 Organic Cheese Crackers instead of Cheez-Its, or Nature's Path Organic Frosted Toaster Pastries but not Pop-Tarts?

An organic food (or its ingrethents) is grown without pesticides, antibiotics, or growth hormones. That's admirable, but it doesn't automatically make it a health food.