Top Food Nutrition Label Tricks - and How To Avoid Them!
In this instructional video, Sol Brah explains how food manufacturers use legal but misleading label claims to persuade consumers that processed products are healthy. He walks through the most common tricks—such as the vague use of "natural," fad‑driven "keto" claims, cryptic E‑number additives, "made with" statements that overstate the presence of wholesome ingredients, and health‑focused buzzwords like "fat‑free," "heart‑healthy," "sugar‑free," "low‑calorie," and "organic." For each, he describes why the claim can be deceptive, often pointing out the underlying processing, synthetic sweeteners, or preservative use, and he challenges mainstream nutrition narratives that demonise saturated fat and promote statins. Sol advises viewers to read the full ingredient list, avoid products that rely on numbers or obscure additives, and prioritize whole foods whose ingredients are short, pronounceable, and available as separate items in the supermarket. He concludes that a simple rule—choose foods with minimal, recognizable ingredients—helps bypass the marketing tricks and supports better health.
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These are the top healthy nutritional label tricks to look out for when you're buying food. When it comes to labeling products, many companies can legally put something on the product that doesn't necessarily mean what it says. I totally understand this struggle for buying and looking for healthy things to eat in the supermarket. When we go in the store, ideally we can look at the label quickly and read natural or something like that, and it's gonna be natural and healthy for us. Unfortunately, that is not the case. Big corporations will use whatever legal tricks they can in order to trick the consumer into buying their product, even when it's not something that they say it is. Preying on the ignorance of the customer, they will sell something that's more processed, more unhealthy than what it looks like, using deceptive marketing tricks and labeling tricks, which I'm going to tell you how to look out for them. Ideally, we're checking out every single label I slip up sometimes even and end up buying something that has a chemical additive or something that I don't necessarily want to eat, uh, because I read it'll say nothing but 12 oranges, and I think, cool, nothing but 12 oranges, it's an orange juice, whatever. Then I'll check the ingredients and it'll say added vitamin C, which is a synthetic additive which you don't want to have. There's enough vitamin C in the oranges anyway, uh, and then you'll see on the packaging it's got a little asterisk where it says nothing but 12 oranges. That's just one example. You have to be leading, uh, reading the ingredients list for everything that you want to buy if you don't want to be tricked. Here are some specific nutritional label tricks to look out for. This is probably the biggest trick there is: natural. Just because it says natural on the label doesn't mean it's actually natural and healthy. All it means is that it's not illegal to put natural on their product based on what it is. Now, it could mean that it's healthy, but it doesn't mean 100% that everything that has natural on it is natural and therefore healthy. Natural flavors, for example, can mean anything derived from something that was once part of something natural. This can be roasting, squishing, chemical hydrolysis, any sort of process where they take the essence of what was once something natural and make it into a natural flavor. Can be a lot of chemicals involved in that process. I stay away from natural flavors because of this. If you see natural flavoring in a product, just avoid it. The natural flavor that comes from a natural product that hasn't been touched is more than enough flavor for the products that you want to eat, for the foods that you make for yourself. Keto. Just because keto is on a label doesn't make it healthy either. Keto has become a bit of a fad. What does it mean? It means that it's very low in carbohydrates to promote the ketosis state. I personally don't eat keto. Some things that are keto approved are also healthy, but just because a label has keto on it, some people will see that and think, I'm— I want to try keto. Or they'll even think that just because it is keto, that it is healthy, and that is not the case. What does it mean? It's very low in carbohydrates. Sometimes this means the food, the food or product has been processed to take the naturally occurring carbohydrates out and sometimes replace it with a sweetener that's low calorie, low carbohydrate to make it keto. Which is obviously chemical derivative of a sweetener. It's not a natural sugar. We don't want that. In my experience anyway, I don't necessarily think that eating keto is the best performing diet for most of the people that I've talked to. Maybe in niche cases it is, but a larger amount, or even a moderate amount of carbohydrates, natural sugars, for me athletically, because I'm in the gym, and also for my brain, as for most people, it is a benefit to have carbohydrates in the diet and not be in a state of ketosis. So I would just avoid specifically going for keto-labeled things anyway. But it is a trick, marketing trick, that people will use, companies will use. Numbers. We should not be eating numbers. Makes sense, right? If you see any numbers on an ingredients list, don't get it. E247, E935, they're usually preservatives, chemically derived ingredients that don't really occur naturally, so they have to, uh, classify them using this long numbered list. You can look up the list, it's like hundreds of these things. Basically, it's a flavoring process compound that should not be going in your body. It's very simple. If you see numbers on a nutrition label or ingredients list, don't get it. This is not a trick as such because they're telling you what's in it, but we're talking about nutritional labels, we're talking about how to be healthy, how to read these things. So the number being in there just avoid it. There's no need for it. If your food needs a preservative to hold on to its freshness— we should be eating food, naturally occurring foods that degrade after a couple days anyway. The preservative, yeah, it makes it last longer, okay, but is that actually healthy to be eating? So you see a number— E407, carrageenan, for example, irritates the gut. E435, polyoxyethylene sorbitan monostearate, polysorbate 60. E967, neotame, You know, these are not things that you can just pick up in the grocery store. Another trick— not trick, or thing to remember— is if you can't buy the individual ingredients list in their individual forms in the supermarket, probably shouldn't purchase it and eat it. For example, you could pick up a muesli bar which has macadamia nuts, raisins uh, dates and then almonds, something like that. Yeah, you can see the ingredients there. There's no numbers. Maybe depending on how fresh it is, high quality, whatever, you would purchase something like that because it has the individual ingredients and they're all in their natural forms. That would be an example of something, a nutritional label that I would get. But the numbers, definitely, if it requires a number, don't buy it, don't eat it. The next trick that some companies will pull is made with, and then a classification like made with real fruit or made with olive oil. One of these things is a butter approximation spread that is 90% canola oil, maybe 10% of some trash olive oil, and on the front it'll say butter spread. Made with olive oil. For most people that don't check labels, they'll go, oh, I know olive oil is healthy, Sol Brah has olive oil, I'm gonna get that one. But on the ingredients list, it's 90% canola oil, but it's legal to say that it's been made with olive oil. Part of it is technically olive oil, so they can put that on the nutritional label. Uh, it's not a lie as such, and so the companies will use this made with whatever slogan, and, uh, in order to trick people. Another one is made with real fruit. Sure. 2% of the thing could be real fruit and the rest is this chemically synthesized processed garbage which you don't want to eat. So avoid things that say made with blah blah blah. Again, some things can be healthy if they have these labels, some of them, the made with for example, but you always have to double check because it doesn't necessarily mean that it's healthy if it has this fat-free and heart healthy. You'll see this on a lot of products. This labeling is the result of the now disproven nutrition psyops funded by these big agricultural organizations that wanted to say that saturated fats are unhealthy and they're bad for your heart. So what they will label products that are high in polyunsaturated fats and these processed canola oils and things that don't have real butter, real fats, real natural foods in them as heart healthy because they have low saturated fats. It's a psyop. Saturated fat does not cause heart disease. You need dietary cholesterol in order to heal and promote hormones and actually protect your heart. It's the opposite. They have this thing the opposite way around, and it's a huge, huge myth that's been disproven. So if you see fat-free, heart-healthy on a product, it's not healthy. Avoid it. It's a scam. This is one of the tricks that they use. It's all nonsense that was created from advertising campaigns funded by these big canola oil organizations. Organizations when they wanted to promote it. And the other side of it is that they can sell you statins in the pharmaceutical industry because statins lower cholesterol, and cholesterol is bad for health. Like, it's all related. Heart healthy, uh, don't take statins either. The medications that reduce your cholesterol actually make you worse off. So it's good fat, saturated fats. If you see something that says fat-free, heart healthy, again, usually to get to this low-fat healthy state that they call it healthy, there's been a lot of processing involved to remove the fat out, which reduces the natural qualities of the food. If you eat a lot of high-quality saturated natural animal fats and plant fats that are high in saturated fats, you're going to look and feel healthy. I've seen it a million times with the people that I've helped and online and things. So don't fall into that psyop. Another labeling trick to look out for is sugar-free. Sugar is bad. Oh my God, scary sugar. Newsflash. Sugar in natural sources is good for you. It's good for your brain, it's good for your body, it's good for athletic performance. We need sugars as fuel for our bodies, the brain, and our muscles. When it's attached to the other cofactors, vitamins, minerals in raw honey, fruits, fresh fruits, or any whole foods that have some level of sugar inside them it's fantastic for us. You're not going to be able to force-feed yourself honey. You're gonna eat the amount of fruit and honey that is correlated to how much physical activity you're doing. When I am in the gym more often, or I'm out all day, I'll crave sugars more. So sugar-free does not mean healthy. They've usually, again, processed the food, taken this scary sugar out, possibly using chemicals or heating things up and whatever else, and replace it with something like a xylitol or these other— aspartame— these sugar-free things that, oh, if it's sugar-free, it must be healthy. It's not the case. These are chemically synthesized sweeteners, whatever else that they're putting in, that are going to irritate your body. Natural sugars are the way, trust me. Similarly, if something is labeled as low calorie on a nutritional label, it doesn't make it healthy. In fact, why are you even eating something that doesn't have calories in it. That's the whole point of eating, is to nourish yourself, give yourself the energy that you need from food that your body needs to operate. The nutrients and calories should be high in, uh, whatever you're eating. And when you're eating natural foods, it's not going to cause the damage or the weight gain or the other unnatural toxic fat weight gain that we do want to avoid. The label exists because of this false belief that's kind of decades-old nutrition science. If it's low calorie, then it's good. You can have it with no guilt. Uh, and that's something that you need to leave in the past because it's actually beneficial for us to have these decadent foods like butter, red meat, raw milk, cream. You're not going to be able to overeat these things. That's the thing. Your body gets to a point where it's like, it has the calories, it has the nutrients because you're eating good natural food. And then you don't get hungry. If you eat a whole bag of low-calorie, no-sugar cookies, you're just hungry after. And what you've done is just put inside your body all these chemicals, all this trash, processed nonsense. Doesn't mean it's healthy if it says low calorie. Obviously, the general principle that eating less will generally result in losing weight, but something that's labeled low calorie doesn't make it healthy. And sometimes people actually having an increase in sugar will lose body fat. Remember, we don't want to lose weight as such, we want to lose body fat and keep muscle. And that can actually be improved and helped if you have an increase in natural carbohydrates. Look into Ray Peat for that one. You're much better off eating whole foods with nutrients in that will satiate you, optimally fuel your body, and create a non-stressed state by having sugars, by having calories. In natural whole food forms. It's that simple. You'll feel better if you do it. Organic. This is a label that can be on food, and obviously everything that we want to eat ideally is organic. It's not treated with pesticides or other chemical things that they put on produce. However, just because something says organic on it, it could very well be telling the truth that it is organic. However, I've seen some products that are organic seed oil slop. So they have organic canola oil, organic soybeans. Okay, it's organic, I'll give you that one, but doesn't necessarily mean that the food is good. It doesn't necessarily mean that the food hasn't been processed into this slop. Oh yeah, well, it's organic slop, so it's better for me, it must be healthy. Not necessarily the case. So just look out for that. I of course try to eat organic everything that I can find. However, just because you see organic, sometimes that's just companies trying to greenwash their product because they, they know that health-conscious people want organic things. So they'll go, okay, we can get an organic certification for our soy slop that costs $2 for us to make and charge more. That is the mentality they have. So if you see organic on the label, just double-check that it's actually something you want to eat. Just meaning organic on the label isn't healthy. Overall, I like to stick to eating things that don't have labels, and if they do have labels, the ingredients list are 2 or 3 things. I can pronounce and read every single ingredient. I can also get that separately in a store. That is a really good rule of thumb to make sure that you're going to be eating things that are healthy in general. Ideally, we're in a world we don't need to worry about these— not worry, but we don't need to engage with these labeling tricks, and we can just see something natural and healthy on the front and get it. Cool, natural and healthy. That's not the world we live in. You have to have a bit of an understanding of these tricks that these huge corporations will use in order to make best informed decisions. If you do buy food or drinks with labels, as I do, as we all do from time to time, look out for these marketing tricks. Thanks for watching, see you in the next video.
