If you venture into a store and saw sugar free cookies on the shelf and they tasted too good to be true, you may doubt they are sugar free. In your moment of doubt you look down at the nutrition label and verify that the cookies do not, in fact, contain sugar. “WOW! If the label states the cookies are sugar free, it must be true”, or at least that is what you believe. Let me be the first to tell you that not only is there no Easter Bunny but that nutrition labels are providing incorrect information approximately 10% of the time. You may think there is an entire Washington D.C. building bustling with with nutrition soldiers and technicians wearing lab coats. The sad reality is that the Easter Bunny will visit you before that building will be built. The FDA does not regularly check nutrition labels at all. There are only a handful of organizations that police the labels that are on the food you eat today. The one big testing agency is, believe it or not, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. They test a tiny percentage of products yearly, along with Consumer Lab and Good Housekeeping Institute. There really is no centralized consumer guru agency that enforces the label law of the land. As a result, the Easter Bunny has become a free range animal and label lawlessness runs rampant throughout the land.

With the explosion of fad diets hitting the market trendy food makers can make claims that are outright lies. By the time one of the handful of agencies MIGHT get around to testing the label, the diet trend is over and the package of food no longer occupies shelf space. If a product should break the norm and get caught providing false information. the penalty is minimal. In Florida, violators receive one violation notice and, if the product isn’t corrected, they receive a $500.00 fine for subsequent violations. In the billion dollar food market just how relevant is a $500.00 fine?

When ConsumerLab.Com tested 34 nutrition bars, they found that three bars failed and one had 33%more carbohydrates than listed; another contained 50% more fat that displayed on the label. When most companies are confronted they correct the labels. But the question remains…What about all the others? A list could be created here with ease that contains many of the errors that have been found on food labels. The point is to make you aware that labels are not always what they appear to be. Our government does a poor job on enforcing the standard they have imposed. There is a simple way to perform a quick cross reference right there in the grocery aisle. The methodology for determining the total number of calories is to calculate calorie content but first you must first know how many grams of fat, carbohydrates and protein are in the product. Fat has 9 calories a gram and protein and carbohydrates each have 4 calories a gram. Knowing this, it should be simple multiplication and addition to determine total caloric content.

In this example multiply how many fat grams by 9. Then take the number of protein grams and multiply by 4. Then do the same thing with the carbohydrates. When you add up these three numbers they should equal the total calories per serving. One thing to note is that manufacturers always round down the numbers so the total may not be dead on. With this simple formula it becomes easy to spot those labels that may be incorrect. Remember, if it tastes too good to be true it probably is not true. Food labels should be always looked upon as only a starting point. If it appears too good to be true then maybe the numbers have been fudged.

Leftovers. Convenient or a pain in the backside? Well, it depends on who you ask. For the person who doesn’t have time to cook and looks forward to just opening up the fridge and pulling out yesterday’s meat loaf, it’s a Godsend. But for the person who’s fridge is stuffed to the gills and he doesn’t have a place to put the stuff, it could be a total nightmare, especially if you’re the type of person who doesn’t like to throw out food because of all the starving people in the world. And then of course there is the boredom of eating the same thing night after night after night. Well, your leftover problems are a thing of the past. Below, you will find a few tips to make leftovers a minor problem at worst.

For those who don’t have the room in the fridge to put the leftovers, especially after a big party, there is one very simple solution. Give the food away. If your guests enjoyed your meat loaf then there is no reason why they can’t take some of it home with them. In the case of things like leftover sheet cake, which is always a problem after a party, you simply cut it up into smaller blocks and give it to people to take home. If they don’t want it, no problem. Having cut the cake up into smaller blocks, this will make it easier to store the cake in the fridge, which will be necessary when you’re dealing with whipped cream frosting.

If people aren’t thrilled about taking your food home with them, you can always try the cake trick with the food itself. Just because you had one dish of meat loaf and another dish of baked ziti, doesn’t mean that you can’t put what’s left of them both on a plate together. Don’t worry, they won’t fight. This will save quite a bit of room in the fridge especially if you have a number of things you can consolidate.

For those of us where room in the fridge is not the problem but we just don’t want to eat the same thing night after night, there is a solution to that problem as well.

Riddle. When is ham not ham? When it’s ham. If that sounds confusing, let me explain.

Let’s say you’re throwing a graduation party for your daughter and you decide to have a bunch of deli platters. You order enough food for 50 people but only 35 show up. At the end of the night you find out that you have enough deli left over to start your own delicatessen. What do you do?

Well, if you’ve got enough room in the fridge, bring it home in plastic bags. Stuff like turkey, ham and roast beef will have to be used quickly. Things like hard salami will stay longer so there’s not an immediate rush to eat it.

Now to answer the riddle of when a ham is not a ham. Deli ham is great with mustard on rye bread. But did you know that you can also take it, put a little cinnamon on it and surround it with pineapple and throw it in the oven? Guess what? When you take it out, it tastes nothing like the ham you had on rye with mustard. You just made yourself a new meal. Add some veggies and you’re set.

What about the roast beef that’s also great on a sandwich? Don’t want to eat roast beef sandwiches for a week? No problem. Go to the market, get some gravy master and throw that roast beef in the oven. Won’t taste anything like the roast beef you had the day before.

There are many ways to get creative with leftovers. You just have to have a little imagination.

If you drop a bomb, you kill not only your enemies but your friends as well. This is the effect food additives have on humans.

Man has existed for thousands of years, and only started using additives at the start of the industrial revolution, when women were set free. Most animals eat their food when and where it is grown. Not humans. Man, because of his concentrated urban areas, was forced to ship and process his food.

Food additives are any substances added to food which may have some “useful” purpose, such as protection from deterioration or spoilage.

Additives are also used to improve taste, flavor, texture, and appearance to restore nutritive value and to aide in processing and packaging. There are at least 704 additives used in the processing of our food.

According to the Food and Drug Administration, manufacturers have to prove that the additives are necessary.

Additives kill bacteria of all living organisms in the food, so there is no decay. There is nothing to prevent them from harming body enzymes and organs.

Milk is a good example. Calcium chloride is added to canned and evaporated milk. It is also used to melt snow and causes metal parts to disintegrate. Milk substitutes contain an array of acids and gases.

Choose your bread carefully. It takes five times the chemicals to make whole wheat bread than white bread.

Sugar is pumped so full of acids, then boiled several times, which makes it the deadest and most dangerous product on the market. Meat has about 13 different additives, ranging from dyes to acids to buffers.

Then to find out what’s in your food-read labels and check with the FDA.