Fast food restaurants try really hard to fool us into thinking their foods are good for us, as counter-intuitive as that may be. It starts with the images in their commercials where the foods are glistening with each slice of tomato, lettuce, and grilled chicken breast or burger nicely stacked on top of each other.

Then you have some of the buzzwords that they use. This part really gets under my skin because it’s such a brazen way of being deceptive – walking that tight rope of legality, while using words that imply the other words that they can’t actually use!

So, when a fast food commercial wants to tell you that their foods are healthy, but obviously can’t, they go for the next best thing: words like wholesome, fresh, all-natural, premium, or 100 percent whatever.
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A simple trip to the grocery store requires you to make many decisions when you want to eat healthy. Organic or natural? What food additives should you avoid? What products are the best sources of protein? Or vitamins?

To help you navigate all these questions, FoodFacts.com has created the Food Facts Health Score. This score takes into consideration the nutrition facts on the label plus the quality of the ingredients and boils all that information down to one number, from one to 100.

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Sometimes I enjoy reading about studies that “look us in the eyes” and tell us the obvious. Take this study led by an NYU School of Medicine investigator: calorie labels do not affect teenagers’ decisions on what they choose to eat at fast food restaurants.

Young people feel indestructible. That’s why they smoke, do crazy skateboarding tricks, or eat foods that are not good for them. Part of the feeling of dietary invincibility is a lot of young people have metabolisms that can burn calories like crazy. Unfortunately, diets are getting so bad that more kids aren’t able to hold onto their youthful energy or take advantage of a high metabolic rate.

In the study, researchers found that the teens noticed the calorie information just as often as adults. However, they didn’t react in a positive manner as often as the adults.
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This week, the food industry unveiled a new initiative to make it easier for consumers to make healthy choices about packaged foods. Food packages will soon start to carry food labels on the front, called “Nutrition Keys.” The front-of-package labels were created to “promote healthier lifestyles,” said Pamela Bailey, the president of the Grocery Manufacturers Association.

The nutrition keys will start to appear within the next few months, but will not be fully implemented until the end of the year. The keys will show the number of calories, in addition to the amount of sugar, salt and saturated fat per serving. The keys can also include two other nutrients, like vitamin A, vitamin C, vitamin D, calcium, potassium, fiber, iron, calcium or protein.

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On Wednesday, British courts ruled that Vitaminwater, a popular line of flavored water products, has too much sugar to be accurately described as nutritious. While UK courts ordered brand owner Coca-Cola to stop publicizing the claim, US legislators have already decided that Vitaminwater claims violate FDA rules.

Now, the UK’s Advertising Standards Authority said that Coca-Cola broke the rules by describing the products as “delicious and nutritious” in a 2010 ad. According to the CBC News,  consumers wouldn’t expect a drink marketed as nutritious to have between four and five teaspoons of added sugar.

“The term ‘nutritional value’ is the loophole many manufacturers use to sell their products without outright lying,” said Mindy Haar, MS, RD, CDN, Director of the Graduate Program in Clinical Nutrition, New York Institute of Technology. “Most associate the term ‘nutritional value’ with ‘healthfulness,’ yet any food with more than zero calories, whether these calories are from carbohydrates, protein or fat, does provide some nutrition.”

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