Quick Bodybuilding Tip: Deceptive Food Labels and Claims

As I was walking through the supermarket the other day I was looking at a lot of food items with labels that contained claims like: zero sugar, zero fat, low calorie, and 97% fat free. While initially one make think that the food item under question is good, upon further examination one can easily see why this is not the necessarily the case. Let's briefly discuss each one of these statements:

• Zero sugar: Based on what I saw, if an item is zero sugar, more than likely it is high in fat. So check the label! Also, be sure to check what the serving size is. Some foods may show zero sugar and one gram of fat per serving. However, the serving size may be as little as a tablespoon! So if you were to consume 5 tablespoons, then you are looking at ingesting 5 grams of fat and 45 calories!



• Zero fat: I saw a lot of things like cookies and other sweet items reading "zero fat". While that is all fine and well, look closely at the nutritional information and tell me how much sugar does the item have per serving?



• Low calorie: What exactly is low calorie? In order for an item to be considered "low calorie" it has to contain 40 calories or less. For us bodybuilders this does not mean much since for us every calorie has to be of a high quality nature. And as you can see, the "low calorie" statement does not have anything to do with the quality of the calories. And again, beware of the serving size as usually the serving sizes of these "low calorie" items are ridiculously small.
  
  
• 97% fat free: Again, this sounds great! However, what does the percentage really mean? 97% fat free means that the product is 3% fat by weight. So as a result, this has nothing to do with the percentage of fat calories per serving. So your 97% fat free product in reality may have as much as 30% of its calories from fat! How could this be? Let's look at an example. Let's suppose that a 97% fat free slice of deli meat has 30 calories per slice and only 1 gram of fat. Since we know that the 1 gram of fat equals 9 calories, then you can clearly see how if you look at the percentage of fat in terms of calories, most of the caloric content offered by the food comes from fat!
  
  And just for fun, let's go ahead and calculate a few other things. Since we know that 9 calories of the deli meat come from fat, the rest of the calories will come from protein (even though some deli meats also have some sugar in them, but for this example let's assume zero sugar). So 21 remaining calories divided by 4 (since each gram of protein has 4 calories) equals 5.25 grams of protein. Now, a male bodybuilder needs around 35-40 grams per serving and a female around 20-25. So in my case, I like to have 40 grams each meal. If I were to use this deli meat then I need around 8 servings. At 8 servings, now my fat content goes up to 8 grams, which is too high of a content in my opinion, for non essential fats (fats that are not Omega 3's). In addition, deli meats are extremely high in sodium, so that would definitely deter me from eating it.

So as you can see, buyers beware! When you go food shopping beware of deceptive food labels and claims. Stick to buying foods as close to their natural state as possible and watch your bodybuilding gains in terms of fat loss and definition sky rocket.