Healthy can equal tasty.
Unhealthy food is everywhere these days. We’re bombarded with advertising on television, the supermarket aisles are crammed with junk ‘food’ and everywhere you go there’s yet another fast food outlet pedalling high fat, high sugar, highly bad for you fare. It’s no wonder we’re getting fatter, and disease and illness are affecting a younger and younger demographic.
Serious money goes into advertising and marketing products to make them seem healthier than they actually are. This creates what has been referred to as a ‘health halo’ effect, where we perceive a product to be healthy so we buy it thinking we’re doing the right thing when in reality it’s just a savvy marketing campaign having its desired effect.
To make matters worse, some food manufacturers are being downright duplicitous in their grab for market share.
Guideline Exploitation
‘Food companies are exploiting school canteen guidelines and putting their own, unapproved logos on sugary biscuits and salty chips to promote them as suitable, everyday lunchbox items, sparking calls for a ban for such promotions. The number of logos boasting “school canteen approved” – or using similar language – has exploded on children’s food packaging in the past two years, with consumer group Choice locating 17 such company made logos in an investigation. Choice says such logos predominantly feature on processed snacks and influence time-poor parents’ purchasing decisions. Its accompanying survey found nearly half of parents believed products with a logo seemed healthier than similar ones without.’ Han, E 2015 ‘Food companies exploit school canteen guidelines to promote processed snacks’, The Age National, 18 October.
It’s clear that it’s important to have a more legitimate rating system. The federal government introduced the health star rating system in June 2014 with the goal of helping consumers make better choices. Stars are calculated by taking into account a product’s overall number of kilojoules, along with the amount of ‘risk nutrients’ like saturated fat, salt and sugar, as well as the ‘positive nutrients’, like dietary fibre, protein, and the proportion of fruit, vegetable, nut and legume content. Ranging from the lowest rating of half a star to the highest rating of five stars, the more stars a product has, the healthier it is.
Happy Healthy Snacks
All of the The Happy Snack Company Chic Pea and Fav-va bean products have been awarded a Five Star Health rating, so you can be assured you’re making a healthy choice. And healthy can equal tasty. We’re almost programmed to believe that nutritious food can’t be satisfying or delicious, our kids won’t like it and if we want to eat well we need to feel deprived and eat foods that taste like cardboard. But here at The Happy Snack Company, we’ve got some good news, because we know that nutritious can be delicious! All of our snacks are high in protein and fibre so they keep you feeling fuller for longer – no empty calories here. They’re also low in saturated fat, 100% nut, gluten, dairy and egg free and with no artificial flavours or additives. Just real, natural ingredients you don’t need a science degree to identify – grown, made and packed in Australia.
So what exactly do our Chic Peas and Fav-va Beans taste like? They’re super crunchy, little bites of flavour, a toasty, roasted to perfection snack that will keep you satisfied and have you putting down the chips for good. So give them a go! Now available in a range of flavours, there’s something for everyone. Healthy snacking just got easier.