Mike Adams, NewsTarget
The myth: Ingredient lists on
food products are designed to inform consumers about what's contained in the
product. The reality: ingredients lists are used by food manufacturers to
deceive consumers and trick them into thinking products are healthier (or
better quality) than they really are. This article explores the most common
deceptions used by food manufacturers to trick consumers with food ingredients
lists. It also contains useful tips for helping consumers read such labels with
the proper skepticism.
If the Nutrition Facts section
on food packaging list all the substances that go into a food product, how can
they deceive consumers? Here are a few of the most common ways:
One of the most common tricks is
to distribute sugars among many ingredients so that sugars don't appear in the
top three. For example, a manufacturer may use a combination of sucrose,
high-fructose corn syrup, corn syrup solids, brown sugar, dextrose and other
sugar ingredients to make sure none of them are present in large enough
quantities to attain a top position on the ingredients list (remember, the
ingredients are listed in order of their proportion in the food, with the most
common ingredients listed first).
This fools consumers into
thinking the food product isn't really made mostly of sugar while, in reality,
the majority ingredients could all be different forms of sugar. It's a way to
artificially shift sugar farther down the ingredients list and thereby
misinform consumers about the sugar content of the whole product.
Another trick is to pad the list
with minuscule amounts of great-sounding ingredients. You see this in personal
care products and shampoo, too, where companies claim to offer
"herbal" shampoos that have practically no detectable levels of real
herbs in them. In foods, companies pad the ingredients lists with healthy-sounding
berries, herbs or superfoods that are often only present in minuscule amounts.
This trick is called "label padding" and it's commonly used by junk
food manufacturers who want to jump on the health food bandwagon without
actually producing healthy foods.
A third trick involves hiding
dangerous ingredients behind innocent-sounding names that fool consumers into
thinking they're safe. Sodium nitrite, for example, sounds perfectly innocent,
but it is well documented to cause brain tumors, pancreatic cancer, colon
cancer and many other cancers.
Carmine sounds like an innocent
food coloring, but it's actually made from the smashed bodies of red cochineal
beetles. Of course, nobody would eat strawberry yogurt if the ingredients
listed, "Insect-based red food coloring" on the label, so instead,
they call it "carmine."
Similarly, yeast extract sounds
like a perfect safe food ingredient, too, but it's actually a trick used to
hide monosodium glutamate (MSG, a chemical taste enhancer used to excite the
flavors of overly-processed foods) without having to list MSG on the label.
Virtually all hydrolyzed or autolyzed ingredients contain some amount of hidden
MSG.
Did you know that the name of
the food product has nothing to do with what's in it? Brand-name food companies
make products like "Guacamole Dip" that contains no avocado. Instead,
they're made with hydrogenated soybean oil and artificial green coloring
chemicals. But gullible consumers keep on buying these products, thinking
they're getting avocado dip when, in reality, they're buying green-colored,
yummy-tasting goop.
Food names can include words
that describe ingredients not found in the food at all. A "cheese"
cracker, for example, doesn't have to contain any cheese. A "creamy"
something doesn't have to contain cream. A "fruit" product need not
contain even a single molecule of fruit. Don't be fooled by product names
printed on the packaging. These names are designed to sell products, not to
accurately describe the ingredients contained in the package.
There is no requirement for food
ingredients lists to include the names of chemical contaminants, heavy metals,
bisphenol-A, PCBs, perchlorate or other toxic substances found in the food. As
a result, ingredients lists don't really list what's actually in the food, they
only list what the manufacturer wants you to believe is in the food.
This is by design, of course.
Requirements for listing food ingredients were created by a joint effort
between the government and private industry (food corporations). In the beginning,
food corporations didn't want to be required to list any ingredients at all.
They claimed the ingredients were "proprietary knowledge" and that
listing them would destroy their business by disclosing their secret
manufacturing recipes. It's all nonsense, of course, since food companies
primarily want to keep consumers ignorant of what's really in their products.
That's why there is still no requirement to list various chemical contaminants,
pesticides, heavy metals and other substances that have a direct and
substantial impact on the health of consumers. (For years, food companies
fought hard against the listing of trans fatty acids, too, and it was only
after a massive public health outcry by consumer health groups that the FDA
finally forced food companies to include trans fats on the label.)
Food companies have also figured
out how to manipulate the serving size of foods in order to make it appear that
their products are devoid of harmful ingredients like trans fatty acids. The
FDA, you see, created a loophole for reporting trans fatty acids on the label:
Any food containing 0.5 grams or less of trans fatty acids per serving is
allowed to claim ZERO trans fats on the label. That's FDA logic for you, where
0.5 = 0. But fuzzy math isn't the only game played by the FDA to protect the
commercial interests of the industry is claims to regulate.
Exploiting this 0.5 gram
loophole, companies arbitrarily reduce the serving sizes of their foods to
ridiculous levels—just enough to bring the trans fats down to 0.5 grams per
serving. Then they loudly proclaim on the front of the box, "ZERO Trans
Fats!" In reality, the product may be loaded with trans fats (found in
hydrogenated oils), but the serving size has been reduced to a weight that
might only be appropriate for feeding a ground squirrel, not a human being.
The next time you pick up a
grocery product, checking out the "No. of servings" line in the
Nutrition Facts box. You'll likely find some ridiculously high number there
that has nothing to do with reality. A cookie manufacturer, for example, might
claim that one cookie is an entire "serving" of cookies. But do you
know anyone who actually eats just one cookie? If one cookie contains 0.5 grams
of trans fatty acids, the manufacturer can claim the entire package of cookies
is "Trans Fat FREE!" In reality, however, the package might contain
30 cookies, each with 0.5 grams of trans fats, which comes out to 15 grams
total in the package (but that assumes people can actually do math, which is of
course made all the more difficult by the fact that hydrogenated oils actually
harm the brain. But trust me: 30 cookies x 0.5 grams per cookie really does
come out to 15 grams total).
This is how you get a package of
cookies containing 15 grams of trans fats (which is a huge dose of dietary
poison) while claiming to contain ZERO grams. Again, it's just another example
of how food companies use Nutrition Facts and ingredients lists to deceive, not
inform, consumers.
Here are some additional tips
for successfully decoding ingredients list labels:
1. Remember that ingredients are
listed in order of their proportion in the product. This means the first 3
ingredients matter far more than anything else. The top 3 ingredients are what
you're primarily eating.
2. If the ingredients list contains
long, chemical-sounding words that you can't pronounce, avoid that item. It
likely does contain various toxic chemicals. Why would you want to eat them? Stick
with ingredients you recognize.
3. Don't be fooled by
fancy-sounding herbs or other ingredients that appear very far down the list.
Some food manufacturer that includes "goji berries" towards the end
of the list is probably just using it as a marketing gimmick on the label.
4. Remember that ingredients
lists don't have to list chemical contaminants. Foods can be contaminated with
pesticides, solvents, acrylamides, PFOA, perchlorate (rocket fuel) and other
toxic chemicals without needing to list them at all. The best way to minimize
your ingestion of toxic chemicals is to buy organic, or go with fresh,
minimally-processed foods.
5. Look for words like
"sprouted" or "raw" to indicate higher-quality natural
foods. Sprouted grains and seeds are far healthier than non-sprouted. Raw
ingredients are generally healthier than processed or cooked. Whole grains are
healthier than "enriched" grains.
6. Don't be fooled by the word
"wheat" when it comes to flour. All flour derived from wheat can be
called "wheat flour," even if it is processed, bleached and stripped
of its nutrition. Only "whole grain wheat flour" is a healthful form
of wheat flour. (Many consumers mistakenly believe that "wheat flour"
products are whole grain products. In fact, this is not true. Food
manufacturers fool consumers with this trick.)
7. Don't be fooled into thinking
that brown products are healthier than white products. Brown sugar is a
gimmick—it's just white sugar with brown coloring and flavoring added. Brown
eggs are no different than white eggs (except for the fact that their shells
appear brown). Brown bread may be no healthier than white bread, either, unless
it's made with whole grains. Don't be tricked by "brown" foods. These
are just gimmicks used by food giants to fool consumers into paying more for
manufactured food products.
8. Watch out for deceptively
small serving sizes. Food manufacturers use this trick to reduce the number of
calories, grams of sugar or grams of fat believed to be in the food by
consumers. Many serving sizes are arbitrary and have no basis in reality.
