What Your Food Labels are Not Telling You and the real cookie monster makes her escape

There was a great post recently on Daily Green on 9 food label lies and I thought it was important enough to repeat a few here in case anyone missed it.

Wisdom is power people.

1. Made With Whole Grains

I had been craving some tuna melts last week and was in the grocers searching for the english muffins and seeing the package labeled whole grains I grabbed that one not checking to see that unbleached wheat flour is the main ingredient; whole wheat flour is the third flour on the list indicating very little whole grains are in these muffins, I mean, how many types of flour does Thomas's need for these things anyway?

Daily Green say that some products that trumpet their whole grain credentials (like Keebler's Zesta saltine crackers) use caramel to mimic the brown color of whole grains. Ugh!

2. Ingredient Lists - now the first ingredient (the main ingredient you would think) on the cake mix box is flour, but since the last 4 ingredients are different types of sugar- sugar is actually the main ingredient and 1/3 of the box contents- this is a real disappointment!

3. Serving Size - the 20 oz. bottle of soda is 100 calories per serving - this is the size bottle that fits in your car cup holder - but if you look closely the bottle contains 2.5 servings - so drinking the entire bottle is 250 calories!

4. Made With Real Fruit - If the label says real fruit it must be good for us and our kids, right? Betty Crocker's Strawberry Splash Fruit Gushers say they're made with real fruit, but the only thing approximating fruit is pear concentrate (sugar) with Red No. 40 for "strawberry" color. Overall, the gushers are half sugar (which means they are candy).

5. 0 Trans Fats - While some companies reformulated their products to reduce the use of risky fats, many just replaced trans fats with saturated fats. They are just as bad, but get to wear the label "0 trans fats!"

6. Free Range Eggs - This is not something the FDA monitors. There are free range chicken labels for poultry which means they get at least 5 minutes of sun a day - yes, 5 minutes - lucky chickens - but no such monitoring for eggs. So free range or cage free on your eggs is unregulated and pretty much worthless.

And, even though I know we can't believe anything almost anything we read these days this car was in front of me on the way to Pennsylvania last weekend.

At first I thought it was Kathie Lee Gifford ...

but, as we got closer I saw that the plastic license plate holder read - I'm a Girl Scout Leader.

Suddenly, I realized I had stumbled upon the leader of the troop that secretly makes the gazillions of cookies all the other girl scouts are out selling!

I started hollering at her out my window that I knew who she was, that she wasn't fooling me with her cookie labels - that those girls had better get at least 5 minutes of sunshine a day!

I tried to keep up with her and follow her back to the cookie factory, but she lost me by making some high speed scout-type maneuvers.

(plus I didn't want to spill my coffee and hubby and I were distractedly arguing about how to work the camera phone- yes, we are one of those couples)

I don't have anymore girl scout cookies in the house, but if you still have any - check the labels - and don't believe any of that free-range, cage-free crap they are trying to sell you! The truth lies in Pennsylvania.