I’ve ranted about this before, but the problem seems to be getting worse. Either that or I’m just getting crankier about the FDA not doing its job. Maybe the FTC can step in. What is setting off this rant?
Sugar Free Fraud
It is everywhere. One of the worst offenders is Voortman.
Not a reduced calorie food
Hopefully you can read the barely visible “NOT A REDUCED CALORIE FOOD.” In the photo snagged from their Web site, I cannot even read the “*” line below.
zoom in
The provided image doesn’t zoom well so it is difficult to read “SEE NUTRITION INFORMATION FOR FAT CONTENT”
At first I thought this was an improvement. I ranted about these cookies back in 2013.
Serving size 2 cookies. Calories per serving 130. Calories from fat 50 or something like that.
At first blush 90 sounds a whole lot better than 130 . . . until you realize the 90 is for one sugar free cookie. Before you used to get 2 for 130 calories.
This is a personal issue for me. These must be the same lawyers who say Bill Clinton didn’t commit perjury and the same politicians who didn’t throw Trump in prison during the impeachment trial.
In short, nobody with an actual soul could do this to another human being.
The Chips Ahoy cookies you knew and loved as a child qualify as health food using the Voortman yardstick.
According to the current info you get 3 cookies for 160 calories. You may notice they don’t make any claims about being “sugar free” either, yet they are just under 54 calories per cookie.
I love Mt. Dew. What I don’t love is Pepsi Math.
I don’t care how you try to spin that. If there are 15 calories per container and 3 servings per container then there are 5, count them 5 calories per serving.
Admittedly the Pepsi Math isn’t as big a sugar free fraud as Voortman. As I said, this is personal, I’m a diabetic. Thankfully I can still just take some very old and well known oral drugs to keep the A1C around where it needs to be.
My mom and far too many others are insulin taking diabetics. Being elderly many of them don’t see so good so they see SUGAR FREE in big bold letters they can’t read the fine print. (Major trouble with your eyes comes with taking insulin, especially for old people.) For them, begin able to call something that is 90 calories per cookie SUGAR FREE borders on attempted manslaughter.
It’s not just Voortman.
I’m picking on them because my mother tends to buy them often and it really screws with her insulin regimen. Why wouldn’t she buy them. She can see they are SUGAR FREE which implies zero calories to a diabetic.
The really bad thing for an insulin taking diabetic is the crash (sugar low). I don’t personally use insulin but have had enough relatives and friends to understand the rationale behind glucose testing and insulin amount formulas. There is an assumption your glucose count is coming from a meal which will have some amount of fiber slowing, and more importantly dragging out, the induction of sugar into your system. You take your dosage based on a formula which assumes a gradual consumption that will take hours.
Putting it in terms an ordinary person can understand, you get fewer calories eating an orange that squeezing and drinking the juice from that same orange. The chewing and digestion of the fiber in the orange not only consumes calories it slows their absorption thus trimming your peak glucose level. The juice, or a snack high in calories is a big fast spike followed by a whole lot of nothing.
An insulin injection is absorbed pretty much at the same rate no matter what you’ve eaten. When you eat something that spikes your glucose reading to 500+ and take insulin according to the formula, your insulin is still being absorbed long after the calories are gone. This creates a very dangerous and deadly condition known to diabetics as a “sugar low.” Weakness, dizziness, fainting, blacking out, severe sweats and many other symptoms happen. If they happen while one is behind the wheel they can be deadly. Blacking out alone will be deadly for many. Without anybody around to check your glucose level and call for help to force some into you, the final outcome is pretty much a given.
