The Shocking Physical Impact of Soda and Juice

For some companies ? particularly fast food ? the laws which orders them to list every ingredient on the label has made for some interesting reading. However, wouldn’t it be a lot easier if the calories were converted into physical activity?

I mean, it?s great that there are percentages how much of our daily intake we’ve had, but it still doesn’t give a clear picture of its real nutritional value. To most people, just seeing a number of calories on the side of a packet isn’t particularly useful. Over at The Atlantic, there?s a great blog post looking into this exact topic.

The majority of the article leans on research work carried out by Public Health professor Sara Bleich. She suggests an interesting three-tiered stoplight system where healthy food is marked green while the junk stuff is branded red. Foods which are sort of in the middle somewhere would be labelled yellow. Here?s an extract of the article:

Counting Calories

Counting calories is, as I’ve written?before, a terrible approach to eating. As the nutrition mantra goes, “A calorie is not a calorie.” Calories from sugars affect the body differently than do calories from fats or protein. Our bodies are great at taking in and storing calories from food, and terrible at burning them. That’s because of a stubborn insistence on staying alive.

Some of the findings are pretty shocking to be honest; one of the main ones being that drinking a bottle of Coca Cola is roughly equivalent to a 50 minute jog.

Personally, I love Bleich?s idea of the three-tiered stoplight system and for exercise-equivalent information on not only and juice bottles, but for restaurant food also. Obesity is becoming a worrying problem in the developed world and maybe this sort of labeling system could help us understand our calorie intake a bit more. Why not have a read of the article and make your own mind up.