What Are You REALLY Eating?

A friend of mine on Facebook posted an article about "The 6 Most Horrifying Lies The Food Industry Is Feeding You." It originates from a website called "Cracked" by Pauli Poisuo and breaks it down into several items you most likely thought were "safe" and contained the ingredients listed. It's pretty informative and made me head straight to my cupboard and see "what's up!" I've condensed it slightly and highlighted some of the more interesting links but kept it in the same format as the original.

#1-Wood pulp-Wood pulp cellulose which has been approved by the FDA as "safe for human consumption" and is added to many items to provide texture. There is also no limit set as to how much cellulose can be added to products.  As humans, we can't digest it nor is there any nutritional value.

General Mills is one of the biggest users of wood pulp cellulose along with other known brands such as Kraft, Pepsi, and Kellogg's.



#2-Orange Juice-"Freshly Squeezed!" "Not From Concentrate!" "100% Pure and Natural!" Nope. Oranges where freshly squeezed in the beginning BUT the juice is then held in large vats where the air is removed to preserve it for up to 1 year. The only problem is.....it removes all the taste from the product. So how do you get that orange taste back into the juice? Flavor packs created by the same company that makes perfumes such as Dior and Calvin Klein. 

#3-Ground Hamburger-Hamburger. Ammonia. Two things that you would never think about putting together. However, several years ago federal officials were trying to figure out how to get E. coli out of hamburger meat. A company called Beef Products Inc. invented a system of passing the hamburger through a pipe where it gets an "ammonia" treatment. Beef Products Inc. has the market pretty much cornered on all beef patties which they supply to McDonald's, Taco Bell, and Burger King just to name a few. They also use the burger meat in federal school lunch programs(check out this NY Times article). The company also has a youtube video explaining how safe ammonia in burger meat is. 

#4-Fake Berries-Most cereals and muffins claim to have real berries inside but it's actually something called "berry crunchlets" or "berry bits." These are made with corn syrup, sugar, oils, food coloring, and several other ingredients, none of them containing berries.

Check out this video from Natural News that will give you the low down.

#5-Free Range Chickens-The USDA's definition for "free range" is quite basic: Producers must demonstrate to the Agency that the poultry has been allowed access to the outside. However, there are no time limits or definitions of what the outside area should look like. If they can run outside for five minutes in the dirt, by the USDA standards, they are "free range." This article by "The Daily Green" goes into more depth on "free range" and the USDA.

#6-Fake Health Claims-Most products these days tell you how great they are for your health, how they will lower your cholesterol, protect your arteries, etc. In an article in Forbes, they reported that in Europe, the Food Safety Authority " has rejected 80% of more than 900 proposed claims over the past several years because they are lacking strong evidence. However the FDA here in America "does not prospectively review food claims because American law says that foods are allowed to affect the "structure and function" of the body, so long as they do not actually claim to treat disease." This leaves you, the buyer, to figure out if those peanuts really will be good for you heart or not.

One example is Nature's Path's claim that it is an "excellent source of Omega-3 fats" which protects the heart. However, the Omega-3 that protects the heart comes from fish oil not flax.