Salt Sugar Fat

Salt Sugar Fat by Micahel Moss is perhaps is one of the most informative and significant book i have ever read this year, not to mention scary. It described in great details how food giants tries to hook us to the food they are selling. It could be sodas, chips, cheese or even energy drinks. They hired teams of scientist to study on ways to increase one of the key components like Salt, Sugar or Fat so as to entice us and keep us going back for more. Research has shown that these three ingredients are the most addictive when it comes to food. Not always an easy read as it went into perhaps too much detail which may interest a scientist or researcher but less so for a layman. It is still impressive research i must say.

Interestingly many of the big food companies are now owned by the very same company that caused another unhealthy addiction, the tobacco firms. Philip Morris (for Marlboro, Virginia slim cigarettes) owns kraft and general foods among many others. Brands such as Oreo, Nabisco, Cadbury and Philadeplhia cream cheese. Of course there are many others that are not owned by the tobacco companies but also equally guilty of causing the obesity of many in the developed world, none as bad as America.

One takeaway from these is that I learned to always read the food labels as marketing can be really misleading even though they have the word natural, healthy, less sugar etc in their packaging. All thanks to the book Superlife that started all this.

Sugar

The recommended sugar intake from WHO is 25 grams or 6 teaspoons. A look at the Coca Cola food label will quickly sound the alarm bell. A can of the drink is already 30 grams and exceed our daily sugar intake by 5 grams. We should not forget also that other food that we take for the rest of the day will also contain sugar and carbohydrates will also convert into sugar. Then you may ask what about Pepsi?

It seems like Pepsi contains even more sugar than Coke, 2 grams more to be precise.

Salt

Now what about salt? The recommended salt intake from WHO is 2000 mg of sodium or 2 grams or 1 teaspoons of salt. When i think of salt, Pringles or Lays potato chips immediately spring up in my mind especially the sour cream type which cause me to crave and salivate. You see how powerful is the addictive formulae!

Let’s for purpose of our studies take Pringles original flavour as an example. Per serving is about 150mg of sodium and there are about 4 servings per container. Therefore, if you finish the whole can, you get about 600mg of sodium or a third of your daily intake quota. However, this is not the worst by far.

Just out of curiosity I wanted to know what about Asian foods, are they more responsible and less greedy than their American counterparts? The most unhealthy version that came to my mind is the instant noodles and look what i have found. Holy Cow! One of Singapore’s favourite Laksa from Prima Taste has a shocking sodium content of 2461mg. This blows our daily intake even if you chose not to eat anything for the rest of the day.

Then you may say it got to be the soup base, the most you don’t drink the soup right? Okay, let’s look at the next favourite which is the dry version, Mee Goreng from IndoMee. The food label was taken from the internet for easier reading but the version sold in the supermarket in Singapore is about 824 mg per packet. Usually a guy would have eaten 2 packets so then it becomes 1684mg. A single cup of Nissin original alone is 1150mg.

Fats

For fats, i will use the guide from the Singapore health promotion board. Fat is a little more confusing as there are several types of fats, you have saturated fat, trans fat and polyunsaturated fat, monounsaturated fat. To make it really simple, just avoid saturated fat and trans fat as both raises the level of LDL-Cholesterol (“bad” cholestrol). Saturated fats comes from animal fats (skin of poultry, fatty meat), full-flat dairy products (full cream milk, butter), dishes containing coconut milk/cream, deep-fried food or food prepared with palm-based vegetable oil. Trans fat is something we should try to avoid or reduce whether possible and these are foods that are deep-fried like fried chicken. Other sources of trans fat are pastries and cakes, cookies and biscuits or any products containing vegetable shortening and hydrogenated or partially hydrogenated oils (read the food labels). Hydrogenation is a commercial process to harden oil for production of fats like shortening and hard margarine.

As you can see, two curry puffs will reach your daily quota of less than 2g of Trans fat. A plate of fried kway teow is almost half of your daily quota of total fats. The recommended allowance for cholesterol is less than 300 mg a day.

Now armed with a better knowledge and greater awareness of salt, sugar and fat, I have made it a habit to read the food labels and also be more careful of what I put into my body. Anything i put into my body can be both a sustenance as well as toxin. As the going says, you are what you eat!