Five Things I Hate In Food

Image via WikipediaThe ketchup post a wee while back seems to have caused a few raised eyebrows so here's some more good old food scare type stuff to have you checking labels a tad more carefully next time you're trundling that trolley down the aisles!

This is a quick scan of some of the things I avoid in food, just in case you'd like to do likewise. I understand that I am slightly more than normally obsessive about these things. I use basic, raw ingredients wherever I can and distrust processed foods in general - hence getting into the habit of looking at what's in foods - and why it's there in the first place. I haven't mentioned HFCS as it was extensively covered in the ketchup post a few days ago and also over here. But here are a few areas to watch...



GMOs
98% of American corn is genetically modified to allow it to live despite being saturated with pesticides. High proportions of the American and Canadian soy bean, maize and rapeseed (Canola, by the way, is rapeseed that has been rebranded with a more 'consumer friendly' name - CANadial Oil Low Acid, in this case) crops are genetically modified. Oh, and cottonseed too. Europe used to be a safe haven, but it's patchier than it was. Generally, the UK, Ireland, France and Germany are hardest on GMOs. India has long battled with the issue and a lot of Indian rice is genetically modified. Interestingly, India Gate brand rice is labelled specifically as containing no GMOs.

Generally, if it's American and processed, the food is likely to contain GMOs. So watch out for those flakes of golden, Genetically Engineered corn at breakfast!

Are GMOs bad for you? I prefer not to eat food that has been modified in this way until we truly understand the science and we certainly don't. Also, if it's been altered to accept massive doses of pesticide that's nice - but I haven't. Here, in case you're interested, is one list of 'Frankenfoods' and the Greenpeace guide to avoiding GMOs. I bet you find a few surprises in the Greenpeace document ( I would have linked to Greenpeace's own site, but I can't find the stupid document there - the site's not terribly well done!)

PALM OIL
I've written about this stuff before over here, but it's worth a revisit. Palm oil is insidious stuff that is used as cheap fat. It's really, really bad for you because it's a saturated fat - basically, you'd be as well off eating liquid beef fat as eating palm oil. It's popular with food processors because its nice, cheap fat and also because it's semi-solid at room temperature, behaving much like thick cream. Watch out for it in ice creams (it's cheaper than the stuff that comes out of cows) and in Lay's crisps, which are fried in Palm Oil. Also in cheaper biscuits, bakes and processed foods such as freezer cakes and the like. You'll often find it masquerading as Vegetable Oil (palm and/or other oils) on labels.

Quite apart from its health issues, palm oil is also responsible for some of the most wicked deforestation of important rain forests, particularly in Indonesia.

E110 AND THE LIKE
You'll often find 'E' numbers lurking in the labels of processed foods, frequently as 'permitted colourings E110, E115'. These are European Union classifications for permitted food additives of a wide variety. This one, E110, is 'Sunset Yellow' an artificial colouring derived from petroleum that has been widely linked to allergic reactions and triggering hyperactivity in kids. You can find a full list of E numbers and explanations right here, some of my favourites include the disgusting Brown FK (E154, it's derived from creosote) and E120, cochineal, which is made out of crushed beetles. I kid you not. They look so much nicer as 'E' numbers, don't they? Oh, and by the way, the natural colour of a tinned pea is grey.

SUGAR
It's amazing how much sugar you can cram into processed foods. A can of coke, for instance, packs a heft 39g of sugar. This website, Sugar Stacks is quite fun, it shows a wide range of foods next to stacks of sugarlumps showing quite how much  bulk of sugar we're talking about here. Generally, foods are labelled with ingredients in decreasing order of weight, so where you find a food that's labelled Ingredients: Water, flour, sugar then you can bet we're talking quite a hit of sugar. Kellog's Fruit Loops, for instance, pack a hefty 48% of their total dry weight as sugar. And they're not that atypical, either.

Food manufacturers often play games with labelling that, after a while, you can develop a 'nose' for. Take Nesquik Fat Free Chocolate Milk. Sure, it's fat free. But it's got 54 grammes of sugar in it!

SALT
Well, more sodium than salt. There are about 40 different sodiums in common use in food processing. Salt, good old sodium chloride, is by far the most ubiquitous. We like salty food, it's more flavourful, so frequently processed foods consist of a good dose of sugars, salts and some nice potentiators like MSG (monosodium glutamate to you, mate) that con us into thinking the stuff we're eating isn't really grey gloop that's been derived from belly button fluff in a huge factors but is actually a taste sensation full of the goodness of the sun and rolling fields. Sodium saccharin, a sweetener and sodium benzoate, a preservative, are other commonly used sodium based additives. We should be consuming no more than 6g of salt a day. And yet a cup of V8 juice packs 480 mg alone. And by the way, a tablespoon of soy sauce is about 1.2g of salt - and stock cubes are little more than salt, celery and sundry other gook - they're full of the stuff. Even the good old baked bean packs something like 3g of salt in a 200g can! Basically, anything above 1g of salt per 100g of product is very high in salt - surprises include breakfast cereals and soups in particular.

If that's not all enough for you, you can take a look at what they put in Pringles over here.

Enjoy that next shopping trip! :)

A spoonful of sugar (helps the medicine go down)

I said I’d start posting up occasional pieces on the food we eat and what goes into it. There are already a couple of these over at the Fake Plastic blog, both of which have been popular reads for people: the post about Aquafina (tap water with a mixture of minerals shipped over from Pepsico US and added after filtration) and the one about Pringles (did you know what was IN a Pringle?) have both been read by a large number of people searching for more information about both products, which is nice.

Here’s one for you: high fructose corn syrup. You’ll find this tasty little ingredient in a huge range of processed foods – it’s what makes Snapple drinks sweet and gives them that satisfying edge of gloopiness. It’s also to be found in pretty much any processed food where the manufacturer is looking to add some nice, cheap sweetener. It’s interesting that this highly processed sugar substitute is found in Snapples, which are clearly labelled ‘100% natural’... The US FDA actually allows this highly processed sweetener to be labelled as natural, which is at best slightly odd and at worst a triumph for some very intense lobbying from some very large conglolmerates.

So what is the stuff?

High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is produced by a three-stage process that takes corn starch and breaks it down to a liquid sugar solution of 45% glucose and 55% fructose. There’s a lot of stuff about chains, but HFCS 55 is similar to ‘natural’ processed sugar in its sucrose/fructose content (it’s got 5% more fructose) but is structured differently, something which has led researchers to review how it’s metabolised. Fructose, by the way, is no bad thing in moderation – it’s fruit sugar, found naturally in all fruit. One of the concerns about HFCS, however, is quite how much of it is being sneaked into processed foods to make them seem nicer. And we're not just talking 'sweet' foods: HFCS appears in a surprisingly wide range of foods, including bread, ketchups and other condiments and sauces.

HFCS, if sourced from the US which leads world production and where 85% of production is in the hands of four giant companies based in the ‘corn belt’, is likely derived from Genetically Modified (GM) corn and processed using GM enzymes, too.

There’s a lot of debate about the downside of HFCS: research has pointed to the rise in US obesity levels being concurrent with the rise in HFCS used – today, Americans eat more HFCS than they do sugar. The combination of natural fruit juices and natural fructose-containing foods with cakes, pies, chocolates, sauces and sodas containing HFCS can be a massive double whammy of fructose, which has been linked to a process whereby the body’s natural feelings of satiety and fat reduction mechanisms are effectively bypassed. In other words, researchers believe that consuming more sugar as fructose actually makes you fatter, faster than consuming normal sugar. Studies in laboratories have showed that rats fed a diet of glucose did OK: those fed a fructose and low copper diet declined alarmingly and their life expectancy dropped from 2 years to five weeks. Many Americans, incidentally, have copper deficiency.

As we all know these studies are pretty extreme – you’d have to eat a lot of fructose before you’d start worrying about those types of scare effects. Well, the average American is currently consuming almost 30 kilos of HFCS a year.

The high levels of US consumption of HFCS are a trend that has directly mirrored the reduction in the consumption of other sugars – in fact it’s the American import tariff control system that’s mostly responsible for the cost-effectiveness of HFCS to food processors (it can cost up to 20% less) – in Europe, HFCS is much less popular. So you’re more likely to find HFCS in American processed foods – but the sheer quantity of it might just raise an eyebrow or two. Because, just as we like fatty foods, we tend to prefer sweetened foods, too.

An American branded soda can contain over 12 teaspoons of HFCS, while an American branded ketchup can contain a teaspoon of HFCS per tablespoon of ketchup. You’ll find HFCS in some surprising places: it is used to keep foods moist, to make breads browner and as a preservative. It’s also a popular ingredient in American health foods! It’s important to look at what foods ‘claim’ to be sometimes. For instance, if you’re looking at a ‘low calorie’ or ‘light’ salad dressing, you’d have to wonder what it’s made of. In fact, many low calorie dressings replace the oil with a nice dose of gloopy corn syrup – it helps to bulk up the texture and offset the vinegary ingredients. And a ‘healthy choice’ American low-calorie yoghurt can pack 10 teaspoons of sweetener!

Take a look at Capri-Sun juice drinks, by the way, or American barbecue marinades, processed cakes, biscuits and sweets. Smuckers grape jelly, Ocean spray jellied cranberry sauce and a range of other natural-seeming foods pack an HFCS punch, as do Pepsi and Coke. In fact a 12oz Pepsi will deliver you a dose of sweetener equivalent to over 10 teaspoons of sugar, while a Cinnabon will serve you up over 12 teaspoons of the stuff.

By the way, Burger King, KFC, McDonalds, Subway and others are big users of HFCS in their foods.

Although there’s no proven link between HFCS and health issues, there is definitely a hell of a lot of the stuff lurking around in processed foods. And if you’d like to avoid consuming in excess of your recommended daily intake of sugar by eating a single yoghurt or drinking a can of fizzy drink, or if you’d rather avoid consuming GM foods, then it may well be worth taking a look on the label first.