| Consumers, it seems, are trying to shop for healthier foods, and they're easily fooled by "all natural" claims, even though the vast majority of food products sporting such claims are anything but natural.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not regulate claims of "all natural." They might claim to, but in reality, they don't. Food companies can get away with using all sorts of non-natural processes and chemical ingredients in a food product that they claim is all natural. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 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.
9. Want to know how to really shop for foods? Download our free Honest Food Guide, the honest reference to foods that has now been downloaded by over 800,000 people. |
| REPPED: The myth: Ingredients 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. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 North America. The complete list has been posted at natural health news site NewsTarget.com: http://www.newstarget.com/Report_pet_food_ingredients_0.html
To create the report, Mike Adams and the CWC analyzed the ingredients of 448 popular pet food products sold in the United States and organized the ingredients by frequency of appearance. Dr. Lisa Newman then provided a nutritional analysis and comment for each ingredient. Four lists were created:
1) Pet food ingredients by rating (from 5 stars down to 1 star, with 5 stars indicating the best quality ingredients). |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Greatly reduce or eliminate your consumption of canned food products. Canned foods typically contain BPA due to the lining inside the can.
Avoid storing food in plastic containers. Instead, choose Pyrex or class containers (stainless steel is also acceptable). Also avoid using plastic sandwich bags or plastic wrap products, wherever possible.
Remember that if you are pregnant or nursing, BPA chemicals are passed through your bloodstream directly to your baby. |
Dr. Edward F. Group III, DC, ND, DACBN
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| Read the labels on all food products when you shop.
You may be surprised just how many products contain soy. Products containing lecithin, MSG, or "natural flavors"
How to Eliminate Toxins from Soy (contd.) almost always contain soy. Avoiding processed foods altogether is a good way to help keep hidden soy (and other ingredients) out of your diet.
How Does White Flour Cause a Toxic Colon?
White flour is a common ingredient made from grains of wheat. Unlike whole grain flour, which utilizes wheat in its entirety (starch, protein, and fiber), white flour is made from just the starchy part. |
Andreas Moritz
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 A recent study reported that two-to-six-year-olds who watch television are more likely to choose food products advertised on TV than children who do not watch such commercials. All of this has produced a generation of children who are at high risk for obesity-associated medical conditions. Doctors report a surge in young adolescents who are developing Type 2 diabetes—which can lead to heart disease, high blood pressure, kidney disease, stroke, limb amputations, blindness and, of course, a diminished quality of life and shortened life span. |
| The current "allergy epidemic" in developed countries may have well been caused by the "miracle food" whey which is added to so many food products, including children's foods, fresh cheese, ready-made soups, diet foods, etc. We are practically infested by this milk protein unless we live off purely natural foods.
Watch out for the Milk Hormone
Bovine somatotrophin (BST) is a hormone which, when fed to cows, can increase their milk yield by 20-30 percent. In the United States, BST was licensed by the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in 1994. |
| Today, soy is contained in thousands of different food products, which has led to a massive escalation of disease in both developed and underdeveloped countries.
Given the fact that soybeans are grown on farms that use toxic pesticides and herbicides—and many are from genetically engineered plants—increasing evidence suggests soy is a major health hazard. With a few exceptions, such as miso, tempeh and other carefully fermented soy products, soy is not suitable for human consumption. Eating soy, soy milk, and regular tofu increases risks of serious health conditions. |
| With soy now being an ingredient of thousands of common food products, the masses are systematically poisoned with harmful herbicides.
One of the genes used in the new soybean is derived from the petunia plant, which is a nightshade variety. This is bad news for people with nightshade-induced arthritis. Suddenly, by inadvertently eating something that contains a soy product, they may end up becoming crippled with arthritis. They may have no problem with soy as such, but soy isn't just soy anymore; it is now also a nightshade, at least on the genetic level. |
| Until the early 1930s, manufactured food products were very unpopular and mostly rejected by the population because of their suspicion of them being of poor quality and not being fresh enough to be safe for consumption. The use of automated factory machinery to mass produce foods for immense potential profits was at first bitterly opposed by local farmers. But eventually, this resistance broke and gave way to an increasing interest in the "new" foods that no one had ever seen before. When margarine and other refined and hydrogenated products were introduced into the U.S. |
Craig Pepin-Donat
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 This is a California non-profit corporation with the goal of eliminating partially hydrogenated oils from all food products. Excellent resource that will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about trans fats and the risks involved with ingesting them. articles & links
Visit www.FitAdvocate.com for the direct link to these and many other articles. |
| People have been lured into a false sense of security with these new food products by thinking they can consume unlimited quantities. If you read the labels on snack foods and divide the contents into portion sizes, you would be amazed at how many calories you consume. Then when you combine our self-inflicted obesity with the lack of physical activity, you get an elevated risk for a variety of diseases, such as high blood pressure (which can lead to blowing a gasket in your brain with a stroke) or high cholesterol (which quietly and without warning clogs your
Obesity: Fact or Fiction? |
| A resource for natural and organic products from nutritional and food products to personal care and pet care.
Tom's of Maine www.tomsofmaine.com
This company offers natural personal care products made without artificial or animal ingredients or chemicals.
Wholesomebabyfood.com www.wholesomebabyfood.com
Nutritional guidelines and instructions for parents on making all-natural, homemade baby food. |
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
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 And many of our food products are now imported from countries where regulations are even more lenient. This researcher plays out a frightening scenario that he hopes never to see. "Let's say a manufacturer decides to change how they manufacture a food-coloring additive in a children's cereal." Bear in mind, he explains, that even a very minor change in manufacturing techniques and trace ingredients can cause molecular changes in something like a food additive to occur—creating a "neo-antigen," or a new target for the immune system to potentially recognize as foreign. |
| Several past cluster outbreaks of autoimmune disease still haunt scientists because of the rapid and insidious way in which thousands of individuals were struck ill with autoimmune reactions seemingly overnight, not from contact with unseen chemicals but from impurities in the processed food products, drugs, and supplements they consumed.
In May 1981, for instance, food product salesmen in Spain sold a rapeseed oil to stores that, unbeknownst to them, contained trace ingredients derived from an oil diverted from industrial use. |
Michael Pollan
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 FOOD SCIENCE'S GOLDEN AGE
In the years following the 1977 Dietary Goals and the 1982 National Academy of Sciences report on diet and cancer, the food industry, armed with its regulatory absolution, set about reengineering thousands of popular food products to contain more of the nutrients that science and government had deemed the good ones and fewer of the bad. A golden age for food science dawned. Hyphens sprouted like dandelions in the supermarket aisles: low-fat, no-cholesterol, high-fiber. |
Dr. Edward F. Group III, DC, ND, DACBN
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| Consumption of contaminated food products can also expose the body to the poisonous effects of cadmium. Many industrial operations expel cadmium compounds into the environment which wind up in edible crops as well as animal meat and milk. Consuming foods and beverages contaminated with cadmium over prolonged periods can result in serious intestinal problems such as colon cancer. For example, some teas and coffee contain cadmium so it's best to stick to organic brands whenever possible. Refer to the chart below for additional foods that may contain this toxin. |
Paula Begoun and Bryan Barron
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 As I often point out, my concern about ingredients like rice starch, cornstarch, and other food products is that they are typically problematic for breakouts. Food substances can get into pores and encourage bacteria production, which is not the best when fighting off bacteria is the goal.
Film-forming agents are ingredients such as PVP (polyvinyl pyrrolidone), methylac-rylate, and the polyglycerylacrylates currently being used in a vast number of moisturizers, wrinkle creams, and eye gels to help the skin look smoother. |
Dr. Edward F. Group III, DC, ND, DACBN
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| The reported health benefits and marketing of soy-based food products have led to significantly increased popularity worldwide. Soy marketers advertise benefits covering everything from heart disease to menopause, but is soy really nature's "miracle food", or is its reputation just a bunch
™ A frequently heard argument is that soy plays a key role in the long,
^ healthy lifespan enjoyed by the Japanese people. Why then, is the life expectancy of the average American so much shorter than that of the
3 Japanese if we consume large amounts of soybeans? |
| Used on crops to kill annoying invaders, pesticides often remain in the cultivated food products. When humans consume contami-
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134 z c c u nated foods, these chemicals (which are strong enough to kill insects and other organisms) accumulate in the colon and slowly poison the body. mportant Facts about Pesticides
"Most of the food produced for human consumption is grown using pesticides."9
"Industrial contaminants (such as dioxins, PCBs, and mercury), microbial contaminants (such as E. coli), and natural contaminants (such as aflatoxin) [can also be found in foods]. |
Erich Grotewold
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 Mixtures of alcohol and water in different ratios are applied for the extraction of flavonoids and their conjugates from solid biological material (plant or animal tissues and different food products). The extraction efficiency may be enhanced by the application of ultrasonication (Rostagno et al., 2003; Herrera et al., 2004) or pressurized liquid extraction (PLE), a procedure performed at elevated temperature ranging from 60°C to 200°C (Rostagno et al, 2004). Supercritical fluid extraction with carbon dioxide also may be used (Kaiser et al., 2004). |
Michael Pollan
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| The sheer novelty and glamour of the Western diet, with its seventeen thousand new food products every year and the marketing power—thirty-two billion dollars a year—used to sell us those products, has overwhelmed the force of tradition and left us where we now find ourselves: relying on science and journalism and government and marketing to help us decide what to eat. |
| And you're better off eating whole fresh foods rather than processed food products. That's what I mean by the recommendation to "eat food," which is not quite as simple as it sounds. For while it used to be that food was all you could eat, today there are thousands of other edible foodlike substances in the supermarket. These novel products of food science often come in packages elaborately festooned with health claims, which brings me to another, somewhat counterintuitive, piece of advice: If you're concerned about your health, you should probably avoid products that make health claims. Why? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 A heart association recommends foods that damage your heart
A solid understanding of nutrition is so rare today that even a well-known heart association continues to endorse processed food products that contain hydrogenated oils. Think about this for a minute: these are foods that contain trans fatty acids, and a heart association is still telling people it's fine to eat these foods. Trans fats are poison to the cardiovascular system and the heart. Why would any health association advise anyone to eat foods containing trans fatty acids? |
Michael Pollan
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| By now we have become so inured to fake foods that we forget what a difficult trail margarine had to blaze before it and other synthetic food products could win government and consumer acceptance. At least since the 1906 publication of
Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, the "adulteration" of common foods has been a serious concern of the eating public and the target of numerous federal laws and Food and Drug Administration regulations. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| Pet food ingredients by frequency (sorted by how frequently they appear in pet food products, from 96% down to 1%).
3) Pet food ingredients listed alphabetically (to make it easier for consumers to reference ingredients they're curious about).
4) Worst pet food ingredients (which lists all the 1-star ingredients, indicating low- quality or hazardous ingredients). |
Michael Pollan
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| There are many reasons to avoid eating such complicated food products beyond the various chemical additives and corn and soy derivatives they contain. One of the problems with the products of food science is that, as Joan Gussow has pointed out, they lie to your body; their artificial colors and flavors and synthetic sweeteners and novel fats confound the senses we rely on to assess new foods and prepare our bodies to deal with them. Foods that lie leave us with little choice but to eat by the numbers, consulting labels rather than our senses. |
| The dazzling diversity of food products on offer in the supermarket is deceptive because so many of them are made from the same small handful of plants, and most of those—like the corn and soy and wheat— are seeds. The greater the diversity of species you eat, the more likely you are to cover all your nutritional bases.
But that is an argument from nutritionism, and there is a better one, one that takes a broader view of health. Biodiversity in the diet means more biodiversity in the fields. |
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
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| Over the past two decades, BPA has meanwhile become an integral chemical in the packaging of millions of food products and other plastic goods; more than 6 billion pounds of BPA are used each year in resins lining metal cans, food packaging, hot beverage cups, and in blends with other types of plastic products. Lab research shows that the bond that secures BPA molecules to food and beverage packages changes over time, resulting in the release of free BPA into the food we eat and the beverages we consume, as well as into the environment. |
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