All Natural, 100% Natural, Natural
The word "natural" on a food label is practically meaningless, according to Margot Vigeant, a food scientist and professor of chemical engineering at Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania.
Vigeant said that "any product that isn't using artificial flavors can bill itself as 'all natural.'"
And sure, you may be excited to know that there aren't artificial flavors in your all-natural snack or meal. But the problem is when you let those two words do too much for your thinking.
"Many consumers infer from that that the product is healthful," Vigeant said.
But there's a good chance it isn't. "An 'all natural' food can still have significant quantities of sugar or salt or other ingredients that are unhealthful in excess," Vigeant said.
Fat-Free Or Anything Else That Is 'Free,' Like Sugar-Free
"This is a tricky one because it is both true and very important for some consumers that a product is completely free from a particular ingredient that they may be sensitive to or allergic to," Vigeant said. "It's very important that labels like this exist and are clear and easy for consumers to find."
And she said that "if a company puts 100% fat-free on a label, it's generally true."
Some health halos are good. It's fine to be a little cynical about a health halo, but don't automatically assume the worst.
But "the negative outcome arises when some consumers turn 'This product is free from a thing that is bad for me' into 'Because this product is not bad, it is good for me,'" Vigeant said. "That flip can lead to a consumer treating a fat-free or gluten-free cookie as a health food, even though it's still a cookie."
Fat-free or sugar-free may be what you're looking for, but it doesn't mean it's sodium-free, artificial sweetener-free, preservative-free or calorie-free.
Multigrain
This, too, is a health halo. If grains were living, breathing people, a whole grain would be a certified fitness instructor who mountain bikes in her spare time, and a refined grain would be asleep in his underwear, sprawled out on the sofa, a little spittle on his chin and a few cartons of empty ice cream on his ample lap.
Whole grains are full of fiber, vitamins, minerals and other nutrients. When you eat whole grains, you're on a glide path toward lower cholesterol, lower weight and lower blood pressure. Refined grains, meanwhile, have removed the good stuff, like fiber, minerals, vitamins and antioxidants.
(That said, as some food products' health halos will tell you, some refined grains are enriched, which means some of the vitamins and minerals have been put back. That's still not considered as healthy as whole grains.)
Food manufacturers like working with refined grains because they can be stored longer without spoiling, and a lot of people are fans of the flavor (white bread, for example, is made of refined grains).
So what's the issue with a product being marked "multigrain"?
Maybe nothing — and indeed, the term multigrain really literally tells you nothing about the product. A multigrain may be healthy or not at all.
"It implies whole grain, high fiber and complex carbohydrates," Besharat said. "Multigrain is a semantic trick. It simply means that more than one type of grain was used in the recipe. It doesn't require any of those grains to be whole grains."