[cookiecaper]

No, I disagree. Foods are regularly marketed as healthy when they are in fact unhealthy. Labeling is frequently deceptive. Foods that are well-known to be healthy, like fruits and vegetables, are modified to accommodate preferred taste profiles.

Go to Walmart and look at the maple syrup section. You'll see about 8 SKUs that claim to be "Syrup", meaning they're just a viscuous fluid, but cleverly omit the actual term "maple" (while showing pictures of things usually associated with maple syrup). These products are called "syrup" but they're not related to real syrup in any way. They are literally dyed sugar water. If you look in the rightmost corner of the topmost aisle, you'll find a glass bottle that costs like $8 and contains real maple syrup. The rest is crap that costs $3-4. The people who buy Aunt Jemima's and the other brands of syrup usually believe they are buying maple syrup, a naturally-occurring food that our ancestors successfully consumed without growing into 400 pound hamplanets. But they're not.

Now, repeat this for every type of food at Walmart.

We need to admit there is a real systemic problem here that is not as simple as individual gluttony. It is not at all true that obese people eat 40 Snickers a day, which is what many fat-person-hate types seem to believe.

[slavik81]

If Aunt Jamima's is unhealthy due to its sugar content, actual maple syrup is going to be unhealthy too. The authentic stuff might taste better, but it's still basically just sugar.

I happen to have a glass bottle of pure Canadian maple syrup in my fridge. It contains 53g of sugar per 60mL. That's apparently 18% of your recommended daily intake of sugar. It contains 4% of your daily intake of Calcium and is 'not a significant source of other nutrients'.

Though, to your point, I do have a second bottle of pure maple syrup that is labelled emphasising it's nutritional value. It has a bit of calcium, iron and manganese, but there's way too much sugar that goes with it for it to be a significant part of a healthy diet.

[cookiecaper]

Yeah, I wasn't really trying to single out maple syrup as an ideal "healthy food". It's just a particularly egregious example of deceptive labeling, inasmuch as most people who think they're buying it are, in reality, buying a 100% synthetic imitation. There are people who will tell you they love maple syrup, unaware that they've never actually even had maple syrup.

A more widely known example is "juice" that is 0% juice.

The same thing occurs with varying degrees of severity for all the food offered at major grocers, including healthier options like loaves of bread (most off-the-shelf breads at Walmart contain large quantities of either sugar or brown sugar) and canned fruits (the "standard" version is usually canned in "heavy syrup", i.e., sugar water).

[maxerickson]

Now I'm curious how many people are really confused about it.

I've helped collect and boil sap, so I'm pretty sure I've had the real thing, but still, I don't think I was ever confused about there being syrup products manufactured from other sugars.

[logfromblammo]

To be fair, canning fluid has to have a certain osmotic pressure to inhibit mold and bacteria growth, and most people prefer their canned fruit to be packed in some variety of sugary water rather than salty or acetic water.

Even the fruit packed with fruit juice is often packed in a different kind of juice (excepting pineapple). You could have peaches packed in genuine grade-B maple syrup, but it won't be able to compete on price on a shelf next to peaches in heavy sucrose syrup.

(You can also make pruno from the syrup in fruit cans that doesn't taste entirely like moldy garbage. But I wouldn't pour any for my friends, or at least not the ones I wanted to keep.)

As for the bread, you shouldn't be surprised that many "whole wheat" breads are still primarily made with the same enriched white flour as white breads. They just have a fraction of the wheat kernel added back in so that the bread looks brown when it's baked. Deceptive labeling.

Even if a type of food is ostensibly healthy when prepared at home using a traditional recipe from pure, wholesome ingredients, as a pre-packaged, ready-to-eat product in the grocery store, it is most likely already reduced to complete crap. For me, it has almost gone past the point where it isn't just a matter of carefully reading the ingredients list and avoiding certain entries. Now I prefer buying only the foods that themselves qualify as a single ingredient. But even then, cans of "extra virgin olive oil" are almost certainly lying, upselling the "3 or 4 extractions too late for virgin" olive oil , mixed with hazelnut oil.

But what else is a consumer to do?

[dragonwriter]

> people who buy Aunt Jemima's and the other brands of syrup usually believe they are buying maple syrup, a naturally-occurring food that our ancestors successfully consumed without growing into 400 pound hamplanets.

The fetishization of "natural" (and related terms like "naturally occurring") is, I would argue, one of the major areas of health misinformation when it comes to foods. (In any case, maple syrup isn't naturally occurring, its a processed foodstuff -- the process may not require particularly modern technology, but its still processed; there's a considerable difference between unprocessed maple sap and maple syrup.)

[cookiecaper]

Yeah, like I said in another comment, I didn't use the example of maple syrup because it was a particularly healthy food, but because it's a particularly egregious instance of deceptive labeling. The consumer is being tricked into buying a completely different product than he or she intended to buy -- no part of Aunt Jemima's or other major syrup brands has any relation or origination point inside a maple tree -- and most never realize it.

[VLM]

"a naturally-occurring food that our ancestors successfully consumed"

I think there's some problems there with the definition of ancestors as in just the last one or two for an extremely small subset of ethnic groups. And that microscopic subset is being compared to a diet consisting primarily of corn syrup for 2/5th of a billion people.

The idea of eating grains is recent in evolution. Unsurprisingly farmers use grains as a tool to fatten up livestock. Works pretty well on humans too. Pancakes and syrup are in no way natural or healthy.

The condiment industry is interesting. Maple syrup in particular is advertised as the breakfast itself, with the pancake merely as sponge to soak as much as possible. Consumed as a meal, 60 mL isn't much. As an occasional condiment 60 mL is a multiple of a reasonable amount. Consider an analogy with hot pepper flakes. A tiny subculture that uses a fraction of a teaspoon to flavor chili once in awhile while its in season will have different medical issues than a culture where basically everyone eats two cups per day, every day.

[unclebucknasty]

But, it's all right there on the label. The problem is that many people just don't care.

Sure, not every obese person eats 40 Snickers a day. But, short of glandular or other medical reasons, they are surely aware that their diet and lifestyle are unhealthy. You don't get to 400 lbs without realizing that it may be something you're doing. So, It's a little misdirection to suggest that people are consciously attempting to make healthy choices, but are tricked into the exact opposite without once questioning it during their journey to obesity.

Add to this the fact that messages about calories, sugar, exercise, etc. are copious and inescapable.

Yes, marketing and even labeling can be deceptive, but it's not the root of the problem by a longshot.

[Larrikin]

I don't think anyone or very few people believe that Aunt Jemima's is real maple syrup. Its popular number one because its cheap.

I'm probably in the minority but I can afford real maple syrup and buy Aunt Jemima's because I actually prefer the taste of it over maple syrup, not because I'm misinformed.

A better example of deceptive marketing would be Breyer's "ice cream" in the US having half of their flavors not legally allowed to be called ice cream anymore sold next to the real ice cream and their few remaining flavors that are actually ice cream with the same packaging.

[cookiecaper]

I'll admit that I don't have any real source for the claim that most people think "maple syrup" is maple syrup. I only have anecdotes and assumptions. It is certainly possible that most people already understand that "maple syrup" is not really maple syrup in the same way that it's understood things labeled "juice" are not really juice unless there's some additional indicator of authenticity.

My personal intuition is that people probably assume some sweeteners and preservatives are added but that somewhere in there, there is an actual base of maple syrup, meaning some product that is derived from the sap of a maple tree. In fact, however, there is not.

To be totally honest, I don't think any hard study on this subject would be any more useful than my anecdotes, assumptions, and intuitions because I think the chance that it would be manipulated by people with an interest in one outcome or another is too high.