Magazine's Top Convenience Foods for Nutrition Fail

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Created on 01, May, 2005

A men’s fitness magazine recently rated convenience foods for nutrition and taste. Their top picks were supposedly examples of “out with the trans fats…in with the good fats…and complex carbohydrates.” 

At least two crackers and one cookie on the magazine’s “Best Foods” list contain trans fats. Apparently they were looking for the Nutrition Facts label to point this out. Since product labels are not required to declare trans fat content until Jan. 2006 (and none of the three mentioned had this info on their labels yet), they should have looked at the ingredients list and noticed that all contain partially hydrogenated oils (which are trans fats) as major ingredients. The three “winners” also are low in fiber (evidence that whole grains are not high on the ingredients list, if at all), and one of the crackers has 350 mg sodium, which is very high for a small, one ounce, serving. So much for their “panel of nutritionists.”