Be Skeptical, Be Very Skeptical

I have more in the vein of reading labels. When grocery shopping, you need to be skeptical and critical of what you see. For example, I was in a local grocery store today--0ne that focuses on healthful foods, which I'm all about--and spied a jar of coconut oil on the shelf. Now I was raised to believe that coconut oil was akin to lard in its nutritional composite: high in saturated fat, and generally very bad for you, especially if high cholesterol and heart disease are your issues. But here was this jar of coconut oil whose label claimed it to be "healthy" and promoting a good balance of different types of fat in the body. I'm no health professional and I'm not a nutritionist, but I simply couldn't buy it--literally or figuratively. According to the nutrition facts, the coconut oil I was looking at had 12.5 grams of saturated fat per serving. Yet it claimed that the type of saturated fat it provided actually had health benefits. It may have been true, but that warning bell in my head was chiming loudly, and I put the jar back on the shelf. (Of course, the fact that the product cost nearly $23 per jar also helped me make that decision.) I urge you to be skeptical of foods whose labels just don't add up to the claims they're making. Until the scientific community gives it the all clear, stay away. And if you want to learn more about coconut oil, go to http://www.dietriffic.com/2007/10/05/coconut-oil-good-bad-or-ugly/.