3 Surprising Food Scams Sucking Up Your Money

Many of us food shoppers (let's face it, we're talking about women here) take nutritional benefits into consideration when making choices.  But what if the nutritional benefits you are weighing aren't even there?  Wouldn't you feel scammed?

LOVIN' BLUEBERRIES:  Always on the list of top healthy foods, blueberries are appearing in lots of prepared food items.  Blueberries are indeed good for you, and a lot cheaper than acai berries, but if you decide to buy energy bars, cookies, muffins, and cereals with blueberries you probably aren't getting what you and I think of as blueberries - you know, an actual Blue Berry Fruit.

HealthRanger has thoughtfully - and dramatically - made a video about the existence of something called a "blueberry bit", which is usually what you are actually buying.

IS THERE A FIX FOR THIS?  Should we give up on blueberries?  Of course not!  I'm buying the best organic blueberry jam I can find and putting that on a plain muffin.  To my cereal, I'm adding a handful of frozen organic blueberries, probably the little wild ones that have such an intense flavor.  I can hardly wait for breakfast.

FIBER IN ICE CREAM?  DOES THAT WORK?  Actually, no it doesn't.

Because there is a perception that people don't like fiber's taste or texture AND there is a recommendation from the dietary guidelines community that fiber is an important part of everyone's nutrition, important enough to have it's own category on the side of the box along with sodium, calories, fat, etc, those who manufacture and sell us our food decided there should be a market for an invisible fiber, one you can't taste or feel in your mouth.  Hence yogurt and ice cream with "added fiber."

The gotcha is that it's neither soluble nor insoluble fiber, the two previous categories we are somewhat used to hearing about.  It is functional fiber.

"Functional fiber is a nondigestible carbohydrate that has been shown to have some benefits yet studies are not clear. By definition, functional fiber is fiber that is extracted or isolated chemically or some other way. Like soluble fiber, functional fibers are often soluble in water but they are not always 'sticky' and therefore can't lower cholesterol levels the way that soluble fiber can. Functional fiber does seem to increase stool bulk and help prevent constipation. Functional fibers have names such as inulin (from chicory root), polydextrose, resistant maltodextrin, oligosaccharides, fructooligosaccharides and methylcellulose."  (for more from this article at Ground Up Strength, look here)

But functional fiber has not been part of the research recommending fiber for not only constipation, but also lowered risks of heart disease, obesity, and colon cancer.  There is absolutely no proof that functional fiber does what traditional fiber is supposed to do, yet it is marketed as the same stuff.  To further confuse you, labeling has not been upgraded to distinguish between kinds of fiber (as it does with kinds of fat), so you don't know how much natural fiber and how much manufactured functional fiber you are buying.

THE SOLUTION IS SIMPLE:  Stick to high-fiber foods and don't think you can fiberize your ice cream or yogurt for some health benefit.  And, BTW, functional fiber is a cheap extender for the more expensive food to which it is added, so you are paying ice cream prices for filler.

TILAPIA - IT DOESN'T TASTE LIKE FISH:  That's why it's marketed as "aquatic chicken" and why you find farmed tilapia fillets with the imaginative grocery store label "tilapia loins." (Fish don't have loins, but then chicken don't have nuggets either, but we gobble them up, whatever they really are.)
 
Exhorted by the dietary gurus to eat more fish for the solidly-proven value of omega-3 fatty acids, Americans who don't live on any coastline have been noncompliant for the most part (do fish sticks count?).  Along comes tilapia, and hospitals, cafeterias, and home cooks can finally serve fish the folks will eat.

"Compared with other fish, farmed tilapia contains relatively small amounts of beneficial omega-3 fatty acids, the fish oils that are the main reasons doctors recommend eating fish frequently; salmon has more than 10 times the amount of tilapia. Also, farmed tilapia contains a less healthful mix of fatty acids because the fish are fed corn and soy instead of lake plants and algae, the diet of wild tilapia.

“It may look like fish and taste like fish but does not have the benefits — it may be detrimental,” said Dr. Floyd Chilton, a professor of physiology and pharmacology at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center who specializes in fish lipids." (more of this excellent article from the NYT)

Are you one of the many grocery shopping moms who thought the "eat more fish" problem was solved with tilapia?  I am, and I'm damned disappointed that there's a fish that doesn't give me the benefits of eating fish that I was buying fish to get.

THE FISH FIX:  Tilapia is not off my menu, but I now know that I'll have to get my omega-3's somewhere else.  There's always cod liver oil or fish oil caps.  Those will have to do for now.

The moral of this story of 3 food scams is that you can never let your guard down when it comes to food purchases.  Food acquisition is just as intellectually demanding and arduous for us as it was for our root-digging, elephant-stalking ancestors.  That overlay of civilization and convenience we live in is just a thin veneer.  Scratch the surface and the savage competition for survival is still very much with us.  Or am I just in a bad mood now that I know tilapia has no omega-3s?