COLUMN: The facts about nutritional facts

A friend of mine came up to me the other day with some bottled water and with a grin on his face, showed me the nutritional facts on its label.

They are as follows: Calories: 0, Total Fat: 0 percent, Sodium: 0 percent, Total Carbohydrate: 0 percent, Sugars: 0 grams and Protein: 0 grams.

After reading this, I began thinking about how often I pay attention to such labels and began wondering who actually reads them.

For example, with the sheer number of hours a person spends sitting in front of a box of cereal during their lifetime, slurping up spoonful after spoonful of sugar-shock puff rings, how many people eagerly turn to the side with the nutritional facts and cheer out in victory?

The answer, no one, because people buy cereal for its bright colors on the package and the cheep, disposable toys that come in it.

Now, there are a few cereals out there that are good for you, usually having names like Blueberry Sunrise or Bran Harvest, unfortunately you have to take out a second mortgage on your house just to pay for them.

I did find one nutritional fact label that was extremely helpful, though. On the back of the fish food we purchased to feed our dwarf swimming frog, named Ribbit, there is a label called the Guaranteed Analysis. Within this helpful label, I learned that the flakes we’d been feeding our frog were 9 percent minimum crude fat.

This made me feel a lot better, as we’ve been trying to watch the amount of crude fat Ribbit eats; he’s getting a little chubby around the gills.

I think that when most people go grocery shopping, nutrition is typically very important, but takes a back seat to a couple of other prime factors. These being price, time necessary to prepare and what was shown on the commercials during “Friends.”

When my wife was pregnant with our last daughter, we’d be watching television and she’d look up at me with wide-eyes and say, “A Big Mac. I’m craving a Big Mac,” when just 30 seconds earlier we’d seen a McDonald’s Big Mac ad. These are not cravings; these are not signals of what our unborn child is in need of. This is simply the power of suggestion.

I have to admit, though, we sometimes lack on the nutritional side of our meals. There have been many times I have popped open a couple of bags of fruit snacks or counted the salsa we dipped our tortilla chips in as the vegetable for the meal.

But, all in all, I think we do all right with the nutritional side of things. We try to have all four major food groups on the table for most meals, try to stay away from sweets and drink plenty of bottled water, paying close attention to nutritional labels and the very helpful information contained on it.

Bryce Casselman’s column runs every two weeks in the Encore section. E-mail him with comments at yanobi@hotmail.com