As you probably know, I am passionate about making healthy choices and love to share inspirational, positive messages. But I realized that lately I have not been posting enough about food and solid eating choices. Two things happened recently that have caused me to refocus at least some of my writing with a "back to the basics" mentality. First, I have been working with a couple of new clients and explaining what I call "Label Reading 101," and I was thinking that this might be a good topic to address more broadly. The second reason, which reinforced the first, involved a quick Starbucks stop where I noticed a package for Tazo Chai Latte concentrate. It sounded like a fun, spiced tea drink that I could make at home. The front of the label has the words: black tea, cinnamon, ginger, cardamom and spices. What could be bad about that, you might ask? As is my habit with all products new to me, I flipped over to the nutritional information. And even I was shocked!!!

I will jump directly to what shocked me about the Tazo Chai Latte. In this seemingly harmless drink lurked 16 grams of sugar per serving. Tazo defines a serving as a 1/2 cup, which is ok since this drink is a concentrate and meant to be made with 1/2 to 1 cup of milk.

I will explain why this product is extremely unhealthy, and its label is quite misleading. For starters, a serving size of this tea (1/2 cup!) has 16 grams of sugar. But wait – there’s more! The serving size does not account for the sugar that is in the milk itself, which will add another 6-7 grams if you had ½ cup and double that (12-14 grams) if you add an entire cup. As a result, this little afternoon drink just about hits the low end of sugar intake that I recommend for an ENTIRE DAY (24-40 grams is a good target, and with a full cup of milk, we are at 30 grams!).

It goes without saying that I passed on the Tazo Chai Latte, like I do on most things with a lot of sugar. That’s not to say I will never eat a dessert – for me, it means that I want to be aware of the items that I eat that contain sugar and choose when I want to eat them. The sugar in this drink was what I call hidden because you would never expect it to be there in the first place. Unfortunately this happens all the time and I am SURE you will be surprised at how many of your everyday ingredients or food choices have too much sugar.

Anyway, you will be hearing more from me about common food misconceptions. I want to share a back to the basics approach with you in an effort to inspire you in a different way. Your body is sacred. What you put into it matters – a lot. You would not put unbranded, potentially crappy, gas in your new car. But finding high quality, branded gas is easy. Finding the Exxon or Shell equivalents for food is much more difficult, which I realized when a trusted pair of vendors like Starbuck’s and Tazo almost bamboozled me!!! (By the way I was in the tea aisle at Whole Foods the other day and, guess what, they had the Tazo Chai tea in tea bags with no sugar!!!! So it was an easy substitute, same taste, same flavor, no sugar…)

The importance of labels and ingredients has a much broader implication as well. Food has changed over the past 30 years. In addition to deceptive packaging and hidden sugar content, a variety of preservatives and other unnatural ingredients are regularly added to typical packaged foods, which are still presented as being "healthy." As a result, I am seriously concerned about what we are feeding our children and grandchildren.

Here’s to label reading!!!!!