Nutella spread had health concerns

 

“Breakfast never tasted this good!”

That is what Ferrero USA, Inc. says in the ads about its product – the Nutella chocolate-hazelnut breakfast spread.

There are important questions, however, to be answered, like: Is this popular spread, that lists sugar, palm oil, hazelnuts, cocoa and skim milk as its main ingredients, healthy? Is their product advertisement telling the truth?

Apparently, a young California mother believes otherwise; deceiving, she says, as she legally questioned the wholesomeness of Nutella.

Athena Hohenberg, the mother of a preschooler in San Diego, California, led in filing a class-action lawsuit against the manufacturer of Nutella, alleging that Ferrero has pitched Nutella as something “healthier than it actually is.”

Nutella’s US website (www.nutellausa.com) recommends the chocolatey dark spread, with 200 calories per serving, as a way “to turn a balanced breakfast into a tasty one” when combined with whole grain bread or a bagel.

However, on verifying further the product’s nutritional information, Hohenberg, a rental property manager, was “shocked to learn that Nutella was in fact, not ‘healthy, nutritious’ food, but instead was the next best thing to a candy bar she’d been feeding her four-year-old daughter, and that Nutella contains dangerous level of saturated fat.

Being a class-action lawsuit and not denying that Ferrero erred in their product’s alleged health benefits, the company has reportedly set aside $3.05 million for resolving/settling the issue with some consumers, including Hohenberg.

Of the award sum, $2.5 million will be divided among claimants. It comes to a payment of about $4 a jar for up to five jars.

Sold in more than 100 countries, Nutella was invented in 1944 by Pietro Ferrero in a pastry shop in Alba, northern Italy. He died in 1949, but the company, which also makes Ferrero Rocher chocolates and Tic Tac candies, stayed in family hands.

 

 

Denmark launches fat tax

An obese woman cooling it off

Denmark has just made history by pioneering the world’s first-ever “fat taxes” imposition in its determined effort to cut down the country’s waistlines and combat heart disease.

Fat taxes is no different from the sin taxes imposed by countries on products that many people consider “sinful” – meaning undesirable or harmful – such as liquor, cigarettes, and the original ones which is prostitution and gambling; intended to discourage use of these products and services and to let government profit off the people who continue to use them.

In the case of the fat taxes, Denmark’s government health authorities are aiming at encouraging people to buy less food containing saturated fats by making it expensive.

Saturated fat is defined as the type of fat found mostly in animal products and some plants.

Sources of saturated fat include foods such as beef, lamb, pork, lard, butter, cream, whole milk and high fat cheese. Plant sources include coconut oil, cocoa butter, palm oil and palm kernel oil.

From a medical point of view, saturated fat is said to cause elevated low-density lipoproteins (LDL) cholesterol levels. It is the fraction of the total LDL cholesterol or bad cholesterol that accumulates as fat deposits (plaques) on arterial walls and poses risk for cardiovascular diseases.

“There’s never been a tax on fats like this,” said Dr. Jorgen Dejgard Jensen at Copenhagen University, whose institute proposed the tax. “We will gain some very useful insights during the next year or two about whether it is changing consumption patterns, and also regarding the feasibility of implementing such a tax.”

The Danes can hardly be called pioneers. With less than one-in-10 classed as obese, there is not really that much reducing to do. According to Dr. Jensen, however, research has shown that saturated fat is the culprit for as many as 4 percent of premature deaths in the country.

But, just the same, if the new tax succeeds in cutting the amount of saturated fats Danes consume by one-tenth, as is hoped, other countries are certain to take notice, not least the United States, where more than one in three adults is clinically obese.

Note that Denmark has already sugar taxes on their pastries and ice creams in place. Will “salt taxes” on the Danes’ food soon to follow?

Makes me wonder at the end, what would this make of Filipinos who never tire eating McDo and Jollibee, who has the affinity for fast foods and junk foods, who goes crazy with the lechon, the adobo, the humba, and anything else fried or cooked in oil, who make their pastries laden with lard, who craves for anything sweet like the halo-halo and other local delicacies that are wrought in coconut oil, and who applies salt in their food with total abandon while having already dried fish for viand. Topping it all is the fondness for sodas and sweet artificial drinks in place of water. Am not talking yet about what the health future of the kids would be who are over indulging with their computer games and does not have the will to play and sweat outside, like we used to.

Tell tale signs are there now and it abounds. If government does nothing, we can become a country of pathetic sickly and obese people going into the full length of the 21^st century.

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