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Nasty Secrets
Men's Health magazine has a section (and now a book) called
Eat this not that! Online, they have an article from it
called
16 secrets that the Restaurant Industry
don't want you to know. Now many of the
places mentioned are American fast food chains that only reinforce
what we know about the collapsing western diet, but I've
been thinking a lot about Michael Pollan's book that I mentioned
here. He makes the point about how the food industry
have cleverly manipulated the regulation and labelling so
that even totally untrue statements about a product are
allowed. The Men's Health story points out how this
applies to restaurants. They
said ...
"It wasn't until we began work on the book version of the
popular Men's Health column "Eat This, Not That"
that we discovered just how hard the industry works at
keeping its dietary secrets. Indeed, the law is on its side:
The Nutrition Labeling and Education Act of 1990 actually
absolves restaurants of all nutritional liability to the
American public. Under that legislation, no fast-food or
chain restaurants are required to provide calorie, fat, or
sodium information for any of their menu items unless they
describe the items as "low-sodium" or "low-fat."
They did their own snooping and came up with the 16 secrets
list. I doubt much would be different here in Australia.
I found the article via the digg list at
right, which gets updated continuously with the top ten food
and drink items tagged by digg users. There's a lot of nerdy
emphasis but you might find some
other moments there of interest.
Fred Harden 9 April 08
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