Choosing fit food Labels are now required reading

Press, 22 June 1989, Page 11

Choosing fit food Labels are now required reading

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JANICE BREMER DIETITIAN

Are frozen chips done in polyunsaturated oil a healthy food? Does cream in the ingredient listing of low-fat cottage cheese make it unhealthy? You like a new chocolate biscuit on the market; it contains oat bran and carries a red sticker declaring “all natural ingredients” which makes it sound better than other chokky bikkies. Making sense of red stickers, declarations, and fine print on food labels is a puzzle to stretch that fine line between your intellect and your drooling taste buds. Some of us will only see what we want to; others will discriminate against ingredients present in the tiniest amounts.

If we look at the new oat biscuit in the supermarket that everyone has “just had to try” we find the ingredients listed as flour, sugar, rolled oats, vegetable shortening, wheat bran, golden syrup, oat bran, baking soda, salt, wheatgerm. This is the order of quantity of ingredients. The main ingredient is white flouf, there is more sugar in the biscuit than rolled oats, and golden syrup adds to the sugar content. Vegetable shortening is a fat with a high content of saturated fats, like butter. The small print tells us the biscuits “are made from 100 per cent vegetable shortening,” which tells us nothing about how much fat or what type of fats it is made of. Oat bran is one of the smallest ingredients in the biscuit.

The package gives no information . about the quantity of fat or sugar. These are the two main ingredients in this type of biscuit that we want to watch in keeping our diet healthy. My conclusion from the package is that the biscuits are high-sugar and high-fat, with little more going for them than other sweet, short biscuits. They have considerable detracting health features when coated with chocolate. New Chips Oven chips (frozen) have been around for a while. Most are pre-cooked in fats; this is why they brown up in the oven just like our deep-fries. The new Australian product catches the eye of the saturated-fat-watchers who are looking to keep their diet on the cholesterollowering path. A frequent question in the last few weeks is “are they okay for me?” The packaging on this product is very clear, and gives you all the information you want. The ingredients are potatoes and polyunsaturated vegetable oil. Both are suitable ingredients for a healthy diet. The question remains — is this too much fat for me? If we look at the nutrient information per serving the label says, 100 grams, which is a serving, contains 812 kilojoules (193 calories), 3.2 grams protein, 5.8 grams fat, 33.9 grams carbohydrate and less than 0.5 grams cholesterol. The protein carbohydrate and cholesterol amounts are usual for our average healthy potato. But here we have just over a teaspoon of fat (1 metric teaspoon 5 grams fat) added to our usually very low-fat potato. This is okay once a fortnight for lean people, even if they are battling a high cholesterol. But even fortnightly is too often for those who are overweight. These chips are an unnecessary calorie '■‘extra.”

You can make your own: 1 tablespoon of oil to 4 medium potatoes — chip them and lay in a flat dish, spoon through the oil and bake in a hot oven,

turning every 10 minutes until browned. This method gives less than half a teaspoon of oil for 100 grams of potato. Cottage cheeses differ A client recently asked, “cottage cheese has cream, is it not suitable for my low-fat diet?” Cottage cheese collapses into a dry crumble if it has no cream added — it is simply a dry curd. Look at these two examples of cottage cheese, both listing their ingredients as skim milk, cream, salt, preservative, and cultures. Cottage cheese (A) — per 100 grams Energy 397 kilojoules (94 calories) Fat 3.0 grams Protein 14.4 grams Carbohydrate 2.4 grams Cottage cheese (B) —• per 100 grams Energy 336 kilojoules (80 calories) Fat 1.0 grams Protein 15.5 grams Carbohydrate (lactose) 2.5 grams The fat content Of cottage cheese (A) is three times that of cottage cheese (B). If you ate 100 grams of cottage cheese every day this adds up to an extra 14 grams of fat per week if you eat (A) rather than (B) — this is almost three teaspoons of butterfat. For the average person, both are good food products. Even the 3 grams per 100 grams cottage cheese — which may also be written as 3 per cent fat — has less than a third the fat content of 30 grams (1 slice) of ordinary hard yellow cheese. However, people on strict, low-fat diets, or who are overweight, will do better to choose cottage cheese B. A similar comparison can be made of yoghurts. Sorting out fibre Many labels only list the nutrient content per 100 grams. This is not always the amount you will eat as a serving. To work out the amount, for example, of fibre content in a slice of bread, you have to do a little arithmetic. If 100 grams of the bread has 8 grams of fibre, then a 25 gram slice will have 2 grams of fibre. Remember the arithmetic; if you know the weight of 100 grams of a food then divide the weight of the food you want by 100 and then multiple this by the number of grams of the nutrient you want to know (e.g. fat or fibre) given for 100 grams. For the example above 25 4- 100 x 8 = 2.

Wholemeal breads generally have a fibre content of 7 to 11 grams per 100 grams. Many breads contain a lot of white flour called “flour,” “wheatflour,” or “wheaten flour.”

Look for the following ingredients at the beginning of the list on the label for more wholesome breads: wholemeal or wholegrain flour, rye flour, kibbled wheat or rye, bran, wheatbran, oats, oat bran, wheatgerm. Tiny amounts of sugar or fats in wholemeal and wholegrain breads don’t count as a disadvantage, even though other breads may be labelled “no added fats,” “no added sugars.” When listed after the yeast and salt, sugar or fat will be in trivial quantities. The place for packet foods of known nutrient content in your diet — in my next column.