Baloney

Just came back from the grocery store, and a depressing walk through the cereal aisle. Half the aisle is snack bars now, and the whole aisle is all about honey and icing and chocolate and marshmallows. You'd swear you were touring a Hershey's factory.

Grocery stores are full of products that have long enjoyed a healthy image, and they are still riding on it. But the products have changed. They include a nutrient, like fibre or whole grains, which the companies trumpet on the product label to suggest healthfulness. But they're chock full of sugar and fat. They're candy now, though you'll never see the word candy used to describe them. We're supposed to think we're buying nutritious foods. As the marketing gets more devious, it gets harder and harder to be a wise consumer. Here are some of the worst culprits:

• Cereal: Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, right? But now most cereals are so loaded with sugar, you're just sending your blood glucose through the roof, first thing in the morning. Make your own granola.
• Cereal bars and energy bars: Marketed as a nutritious snack, but with the high sugar and saturated fat content, most of them are just as bad as a candy bar. Eat an apple, a handful of nuts, a bowl of soup.
• Dried fruit: Also marketed as a nutritious snack, but they're concentrated sugar. Sometimes they even have extra sugar added. Eat real fruit.
• Juice: Doesn't have the fibre of real fruit, and often has as much sugar as pop does. Drink water.
• Low-fat yogurt: When the manufacturers take out the fat, what do they put in to make up for the loss in flavour? Sugar, of course! Read those labels.

Sorry if I sound like Miss Grundy, but my body isn't very forgiving any more and it pays no attention to marketing hype. And don't even get me started on super-sweet apples and grape tomatoes and corn on the cob!