Last week I was leading a grocery store tour at a local Albertson’s for the participants that have enrolled in my 8 week weight loss program.\u00a0 For the past few weeks we have been discussing food labels, misleading marketing claims, and learning the truth about what is best for our health. While on our grocery store tour, I noticed a new product that I had not seen before…Jif’s Omega-3 Peanut Butter.\u00a0 It was a perfect example of what companies try to do to make their products appear healthy when in reality, they are not!<\/p>\n

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Most of us know that Omega-3 fats are beneficial to our health. Specifically, they have been proven to increase our HDL (good) cholesterol. Clearly, this product has been marketed to get the consumer’s attention. However, we have to look at the ingredient list because that is where companies are legally bound to tell the truth.<\/p>\n

Here are the facts. While this product has had Omega-3 fats added to it in the form of anchovy and sardine oil, the other ingredients are far more important. Ingredients are listed in descending order of abundance. Peanut butter’s first ingredient should be peanuts (which it is here) but the second ingredient is sugar. You will also notice that the fourth ingredient is fully hydrogenated vegetable oils.<\/span> This means it contains trans fat, a fat that both INCREASES our LDL (bad) cholesterol and LOWERS our HDL cholesterol. Do you see where I am going with this? Any benefit that the added omega-3 fats may potentially have are discredited by the other harmful, unnecessary ingredients.<\/p>\n

And you may notice that the Nutrition Facts label\u00a0boasts “O grams of trans fat.” Here is the other piece of necessary information that\u00a0you need to know, if a product has less than 0.5 grams of trans fat per serving, it can write “O’ on the label. Consuming a mere 3 grams of trans fat per day can affect our cholesterol, and most of it comes in tricky sources like this.<\/p>\n

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This is the peanut butter I choose…Laura Scudder’s smooth, unsalted peanut butter. You will notice that the only ingredient is peanuts. It is a much healthier choice and it is actually cheaper than Jif’s Omega 3 peanut butter.<\/p>\n

It is very unfortunate that this type of deceitful marketing is currently allowed in our grocery stores. This means it is our responsibility to become educated consumers\u00a0 and always look at the food labels…where the companies can’t provide misleading information.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last week I was leading a grocery store tour at a local Albertson’s for the participants that have enrolled in my 8 week weight loss program.\u00a0 For the past few weeks we have been discussing food labels, misleading marketing claims, and learning the truth about what is best for our health. While on our grocery […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,8,10],"tags":[33,56,77,84,88,91,128],"class_list":{"0":"post-190","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-cholesterol","7":"category-dietitian","8":"category-food-labels","9":"category-main-menu","10":"tag-cholesterol-2","11":"tag-food-label","12":"tag-marketing","13":"tag-nutrition-facts","14":"tag-omega-3-fat","15":"tag-peanut-butter","16":"tag-trans-fat","17":"entry"},"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lorizanini.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lorizanini.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lorizanini.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorizanini.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorizanini.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=190"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lorizanini.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/190\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lorizanini.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorizanini.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lorizanini.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}