Food Labels…We need to understand them, what they actually mean, how they can mislead us…

When we read the nutrition part of the label, the part telling us about the vitamins and mineral content of the product, it is often listing the ADDED, aka “Enriched” nutrition that can be found below this label, in the ingredients.

Along side the actual food-type ingredients, we’ll often also see the other additives, such as preservatives (after all, if we’re reading an ingredient label on a box to begin with, the *majority* of the time, we are reading the contents of a packaged, processed food that needs some form of preservative to maintain its integrity), colorings, and flavor enhancers (among other fun and…tasty?…items) and well see the added vitamins and minerals, most of the time in their lab-made forms.  The added calciums and vitamin D’s are biggies, since there is such a (misguided) marketing thrust behind these kinds of nutrients.

The problem boils down to the kind and quality of these added vitamins and minerals.  Often times if we see B12 on the nutrition label, say “50% of our daily value,” in the product, which kind of B12 are they adding to this food?  The “cyano” variety, the “methyl” variety, or other?

Some people, such as yours truly, feel strongly that certain types of vitamins and minerals are far more body-friendly and conducive to superior health over others.  Some, in fact, may be entirely counter-productive to health (such as most forms of added calcium) but the research and science behind this has not yet caught up to the masses nor the food manufacturers.  There is now plenty of evidence that adding calcium to the diet as a supplement, may be doing far more harm than good, as it relates to the formation of nanobacteria in the body, arterial plaque, and organ calcification.  This gives us symptoms including oral health issues (the same type of plaque), heart and blood pressure issues, erection problems, prostate and other calcification of organs.

This could in turn be causing the massive magnesium deficiency that it is projected 80% of the western world now faces, since calcium and magnesium need each other for proper mineral balance.

They use percentage values to determine what amounts of these vitamins and minerals are considered most beneficial to our health, and in that process can utilize the nutrition label as more of a marketing medium than anything else, as these levels are claimed to be met based on what “enrichment” occurs in the food product.

The daily recommendations are questionable enough to begin with.  Many believe that not only are they very outdated, but from what little seems to really be understood about both the nutrition that people need on a daily basis as well as how well that nutrition is actually absorbed based on the source of that nutrition, that both the levels described and the forms of vitamins and minerals added may be giving us more problems than solutions.

(Boy was THAT ever one long run-on sentence!…;p)

Perhaps this video will help: