Posted inThank You Sir May I Have Another

Sugar Free Products That Aren’t Sugar Free

seasoned_geek by seasoned_geek

I have seen a rash of this lately.  Perhaps it is because I read labels closer now.  The most recent flagrant abuse of advertising came on a package of fudge stripe cookies at my mother’s house.  In great big bold letters it proclaimed to be “Sugar Free”.  In font too small for elderly diabetic eyes to read was something along the lines “this is not a reduced calorie product” or some such thing.

Why such outrage?  I read the tiny little nutrition chart on the back.  Serving size 2 cookies.  Calories per serving 130. Calories from fat 50 or something like that.  Compare that with a serving size of 3 cookies for Chips O’Hoy no reduced nothing and a calorie count of 180.

The only “free” product I’ve stumbled across lately which was wonderful were the “gluten free” chocolate flavored Quaker Oats rice cakes.  I don’t want to know what is in them.  They taste great and are only 60 calories.

Roland Hughes started his IT career in the early 1980s. He quickly became a consultant and president of Logikal Solutions, a software consulting firm specializing in OpenVMS application and C++/Qt touchscreen/embedded Linux development. Early in his career he became involved in what is now called cross platform development. Given the dearth of useful books on the subject he ventured into the world of professional author in 1995 writing the first of the "Zinc It!" book series for John Gordon Burke Publisher, Inc.

A decade later he released a massive (nearly 800 pages) tome "The Minimum You Need to Know to Be an OpenVMS Application Developer" which tried to encapsulate the essential skills gained over what was nearly a 20 year career at that point. From there "The Minimum You Need to Know" book series was born.

Three years later he wrote his first novel "Infinite Exposure" which got much notice from people involved in the banking and financial security worlds. Some of the attacks predicted in that book have since come to pass. While it was not originally intended to be a trilogy, it became the first book of "The Earth That Was" trilogy:
Infinite Exposure
Lesedi - The Greatest Lie Ever Told
John Smith - Last Known Survivor of the Microsoft Wars

When he is not consulting Roland Hughes posts about technology and sometimes politics on his blog. He also has regularly scheduled Sunday posts appearing on the Interesting Authors blog.