Kate Hawkesby: Check the box - the alarming truth about some health foods

COMMENT: Here's what we've learned so far regarding what we eat and drink: almond milk has virtually no almonds, ginger ale contains no ginger - and we all say we want free range eggs, but we don't actually buy them.

Let's start with the milk. Almond milk, is 97.5 per cent not almonds.

This reminds me of the great Up and Go scandal of a few years ago, where people seemed up in arms when they worked out that the advertised 'liquid morning cereal' containing the fibre of two Weet-Bix and milk, as the ad went, was in fact largely just sugar, and no actual Weet-Bix at all.

If you're sticking a plastic straw into a tetra pack box, and slurping it up, I can pretty much assure you, that's not a Weet-Bix situation.

But back to almond milk.

If you expected it to be crushed up almonds, you're going to be sorely disappointed.
Did anyone expect it to be full of almonds though, really?

In your standard supermarket variety almond milk, the amount of actual almonds can be as little as 2.5 per cent.

Perhaps the correct labelling for almond milk should be 'may contain traces of nuts'.

So what about the ginger ale?

Well if you thought that had any ginger in it you just need to taste it.

A woman actually sued Canada Dry over this. I'm not making this up.
She thought it was a healthy drink made with ginger root.

She's not the first person to have sued ginger ale for not being a healthy ginger based drink.

What part though of fizzy sweet caramel-coloured soft drink, which sits next to Coke in the shopping aisle, makes you think it's healthy?

And then we get to the eggs.

Free range eggs have been in the news this week after the Commerce Commission laid charges against a West Auckland egg farmer, who it alleges was selling caged eggs, under the free range label. What a loser and he deserves to be shut down.

But here's the thing about free range: we love the idea of it, but when it comes to paying for it, many of us don't.

About two-thirds of eggs sold in NZ are from caged hens, according to supermarkets.
Buying with your conscience costs more - free range eggs are often twice the price.

And it tends to be a bit of the old, if we don't see it, do we care?
Sure, on a cafe menu, we like to see the words 'free range' - but, if we're buying a bakery muffin, do we stop to ask if the egg used was caged or not?

So just because something has a picture of almonds on it, doesn't mean it's all almond milk; calling something ginger ale doesn't mean it's a healthy drink made of ginger - and an egg labelled free range may very well not be.

Better living everyone.