This is part of a continuing series on Food Marketing Shenanigans that explores: How does it happen that when it comes to food, smart people are often not so very smart? It’s because we need a different kind of smarts to stay healthy in an unhealthy food environment, i.e., “marketing-smarts.”

Ingredient Listings: The best defense against Food Marketing Shenanigans

True to its name, an “ingredient listing” is a listing of all the ingredients in a product. Taking advantage of their vital health information isn’t easy, however. Manufacturers use the tiniest print legally allowable so most of us don’t even notice the listings on a package. And anyway, who wants to read a paragraph of tiny gobbledygook? That’s the idea, of course, since manufacturers don’t want you to know what you might be eating.

Save your health–and life–by reading the fine print and finding out what you’re really eating. Sure, you can get the calories, sugar, vitamins and fat content from the nutrition facts label, but far more important is knowing where those nutrients are coming from: e.g., highly processed refined grains? poor oils? addictive sugars? questionable preservatives, fillers, colorings, etc.?

This is what an ingredient listing looks like. (From Lay’s Veggie Poppables in the previous post.)

Once you read it, consider it: For instance, on the plus side, the Poppables are made with real whole foods. On the downside, ingredients are listed by their weight in the product, so you can see that these “Veggie” Poppables are mostly starch, flour and oil–and the oils are not the best. What’s more, even if tomato, spinach and beet powders were a good substitute for the real thing, they are far down on the ingredient list and can’t be considered a good source of vegetables.