Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 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.
Deceiving consumers: Tricks of the food trade
If the Nutrition Facts section on food packaging list all the substances that go into a food product, how can they deceive consumers? |
| 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.
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. It's a replacement for the USDA's highly corrupt and manipulated Food Guide Pyramid, which is little more than a marketing document for the dairy industry and big food corporations. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Read the ingredients on everything you buy and you'll find that the largest "natural" food manufacturers still use hidden MSG.
(The newest ingredient to hide MSG under is called torula yeast. Watch for it on labels.)
Click here to view our CounterThink cartoon on this topic.
What's the definition of all-natural, anyway?
The truth is that food manufacturers can use just about any ingredients or processes they want while still claiming their foods are all-natural. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
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 Food companies and farmers can protect themselves
Whether the tipping point is achieved through a new scientific finding, a national education campaign, a religious leader, legislation, or even a well-received segment on Oprah Winfrey, there is an excellent chance that US food manufacturers will abandon GM foods in the near future. Several have already taken steps to protect themselves by avoiding GM ingredients. Still, farmers and food manufacturers may need to do more than just avoid GMOs in their own operations to protect themselves. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 REPPED: With new trans fat labeling laws now going into effect, which require food manufacturers to list the trans fat content right on the nutrition facts label, it's time to be brutally honest about the continued use of trans fat and hydrogenated oils in the food manufacturing industry.
For decades, food manufacturers have known about the dangers to the health of consumers caused by hydrogenated oils, and yet, until recently, food manufacturers were able to claim innocence by saying that their ingredient was not really proven to be dangerous, or that it is perfectly legal to use. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 But in the mid 20th century, food manufacturers started using sodium nitrite in commercial preservation. This chemical is responsible for the pinkish color in meat to which consumers have grown accustomed. Although today the use of refrigeration is largely what protects consumers from botulism and bacteria, manufacturers still add sodium nitrite to make the meat look pinkish and fresh.
The nitrites themselves are not the problem. People get more nitrites from vegetables than they do from meat, according to research by the University of Minnesota. |
| Chips / crackers / cookies: These generally contain white flour and sugar as well as trans fats, but it's not enough to simply look for these ingredients on the label; you have to actually "decode" the ingredients list that food manufacturers use to deceive consumers. They do this by hiding ingredients (such as hiding MSG in yeast extract, or by fiddling with serving sizes so they can claim the food is trans fat free, even when it contains trans fats (the new Girl Scout cookies use this trick).
Besides avoiding these foods, what else can consumers do to reduce their risk of cancer? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 If you look at where the money is coming from that supports most of the "disease" groups, it's all from the companies that expose consumers to synthetic chemicals: drug companies, processed food manufacturers, personal care product companies, and so on.
It is no coincidence that the mainstream disease groups keep the chemical causes of cancer and neurological disorders a big secret. They're primarily focused on treatment, not prevention. |
| The answer, of course, is because these associations earn money by licensing their logos and recommendations to processed food manufacturers. Anything for a buck, it seems.
This kind of cowardly approach to health is prevalent across conventional medicine, and it usually involves conflicts of interest with the big corporations funding many of today's most prominent disease organizations. The American Diabetes Association, for example, accepted millions of dollars from soft drink companies and candy manufacturers. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 So buy food and food products from small, local companies or "natural" food manufacturers. Visit your local food coop. Eat local!
3. Support legislative efforts to require the labeling of genetically modified food ingredients. I'm not aware of any such pending legislation that's anywhere close to a vote, but if such legislation appears on the horizon, you can count on NewsTarget to rally readers to the cause. Make sure you're a subscriber to receive our email alerts. Click here to subscribe (free).
4. Read the Center for Food Safety report on pharmaceutical rice. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Most people simply don't take care of their own health, and while I could argue for days about the need for more patient responsibility alongside corporate responsibility, the fact is that relentless advertising from drug companies and food manufacturers has bred a mindset of disease, junk food consumption, pharmaceutical dependence and patient victimization. We have a health crisis in this country, and it's going to take genuinely radical reforms to turn this around and save America from a financial wipeout exacerbated by runaway health care spending. |
Andreas Moritz
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 For this reason, U.S. food manufacturers are required to fortify their olestra-containing products with all these vitamins; this gives the false impression that these foods are now safe for human consumption. But uncontrolled intake of vitamin K can endanger the lives of hemophiliacs; and a pregnant mother may risk her baby's life by taking too much vitamin A. Apart from removing vitamins from the body (and thoroughly confusing the body), olestra also reduces the absorption of carotenoids that help us to prevent cancer, heart disease, and strokes. Pseudo-fats cannot fool even animals. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| There is little truth left in the food industry
Consumers are a gullible bunch, and food manufacturers have mastered the art of selling people crap while getting them to believe it's actually good for them. There's really no effort taken by the mainstream food industry to make foods healthy; there's only an effort to make them appear to be healthy. It's all about marketing. The same junk food crap that wasn't labeled with any health claims two years ago is now labeled "all natural" and positioned in the healthy food section of the grocery store. Same ingredients, new spin. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Require food manufacturers to list acrylamides, pesticides and heavy metals content on the label
Food companies don't really want you to know what's in their foods. Oh, they claim to list everything on the label, but that's not really everything. What's missing? All the stuff that kills you: the acrylamides, pesticides, heavy metals and other contaminants that are either sprayed on the foods, absorbed through the soils or created during high-heat cooking processes.
Acrylamides are cancer-causing substances created when carbohydrates are cooked at high temperatures -- frying, baking, etc. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| This is well known throughout the industry. Baby food manufacturers, for example, voluntarily removed MSG from their products decades ago following a public outcry about the dangers of MSG to babies and infants.
And yet today, numerous "all natural" food companies continue to use hidden forms of MSG in their foods, hiding them under innocent-sounding ingredients like yeast extract, autolyzed or hydrolyzed proteins (all of which contain MSG). Even the companies you've grown to trust in the "natural" food business are engaged in the blatant hiding of MSG in their products. |
| REPPED: Factory food manufacturers have figured out that slapping an "all natural" claim onto their processed, chemically-altered food products results in increased sales. 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. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 Big Pharma and the FDA (with a little help from processed food manufacturers) have destroyed the health of this nation, and they are working hard on destroying its economy, too. It will take America three generations to recover from the damage done by this criminal-minded industry, and history will judge Congress harshly for its blatant unwillingness to put a stop to this system of modern medicine that has become the No. 1 threat to the American people.
No war, no terrorist action and no viral pandemic has even come close to the number of Americans killed by FDA-approved prescription drugs. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 FDA is pressuring food manufacturers to remove the additives from the national food supply.
Back in the USA, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration seems to have heard nothing about this issue. It's doing nothing to protect children from such food additives and, in fact, appears to be taking a position that pretends the Southampton research never took place at all. There's nothing quite like burying your head in the sand when it comes to running the food and drug industry in the United States, is there?
Check out my bulging sugar sack...
So now Halloween arrives, and guess what? |
Michael Pollan
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 And then there were the food manufacturers, which stood to make very little money from my grandmother's cooking, because she was doing so much of it from scratch— up to and including rendering her own cooking fats. Amplifying the "latest science," they managed to sell her daughter on the virtues of hydrogenated vegetable oils, the ones that we're now learning may be, well, deadly substances.
Sooner or later, everything solid we've been told about the links between our diet and our health seems to get blown away in the gust of the most recent study. Consider the latest findings. |
Donna Jackson Nakazawa
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 Today, industrial food manufacturers have at their disposal an endless variety of chemical ways to preserve food, including benzoates, BHA, BHT, FD&C dyes, MSG, nitrates, nitrites, parabens, and sulfites. The final step in food processing is the addition of vitamins and minerals, to make up for what was lost during the initial heat-stripping phase. |
Craig Pepin-Donat
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 But as discussed, food manufacturers and the chemical companies have decided to add thousands of synthetic chemicals to our food and beverages in the form of preservatives, dyes, flavorings, flavor enhancers, stabilizers and artificial sweeteners. You truly do not know what you are eating.
Let's take a closer look at artificial sweeteners. They are of special interest to me based on the personal experience I've had with them over the years. Artificial sweeteners are designed to reduce the caloric content in foods. The market is flooded with these products. |
| Web site also provides other information about food labels and how to decipher the various food-labeling loopholes employed by food manufacturers.
"Portion Control Induces Greatest Weight Loss Suma Study Finds"
Medical News Today (November 30, 2006)
"Protein: Moving Closer to Center Stage"
Article from the Harvard School of Public Health
Chapter Six
The Fitness Fabrication
Enrolling in a fitness center may prove to be the best solution for the average person. |
Andreas Moritz
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| At last, food manufacturers have complied with the demands made by nutritional scientists and dieticians to produce foods with fewer calories. Consumers feel relieved that the new food is fat-free and without sugar, and instead contains fat substitutes, water and artificial sweeteners. This saves massive amounts of calories. And by adding artificial flavors to the food and using other forms of chemical manipulation, the taste buds believe that it is the real thing. |
| The mass media, medical industry and food manufacturers have not taken much notice of this important finding. In the meanwhile, the low-fat hysteria continues to escalate.
"Light Fats" and their "Amazing" Effects
Take for instance "light-butter" or half-fat butter, which has been heralded as one of the greatest "achievements" of food technology so far. In this high-tech product, at least half of the fat content of butter is replaced with water. It tastes like butter, it spreads like butter and it melts like butter in the mouth, but in reality it is mostly water. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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| The truth is that food manufacturers can use just about any ingredients or processes they want while still claiming their foods are all-natural. They can take whole wheat berries from nature, mill them down and strip out 98% of the nutrients, bleach the flour with chemicals, "enrich" the flour with synthetic chemical vitamins, and then claim their wheat is "all natural."
And why is it natural? Because it comes from the earth, they would say. It was grown by nature. |
Connie Bennett, C.H.H.C. with Stephen T. Sinatra, M.D.
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 Big Tobacco Is Often Behind Big Sugar
Although we're talking about lawsuits against food manufacturers, obesity and eating disorders expert Kelly D. Brownell, Ph.D., points out that the tobacco industry actually controls important parts of the foods industry.
"Nabisco, a massive company once connected with R.J. Reynolds, is now owned by Kraft, as are Planters, Oscar Meyer, and many other companies," Dr. Brownell writes in his book, Food Fight: The Inside Story of the Food Industry, America's Obesity Crisis, and What We Can Do About It. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
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| Thousands of consumers complained to food manufacturers about possible reactions to StarLink corn and an expert panel determined that its Bt protein had a "medium likelihood" of being a human allergen20 (section 3.5).
• Filipinos from at least five villages developed severe symptoms when nearby Bt cornfields were pollinating21 (section 1.7).
• Indian farm workers exposed to Bt cotton developed moderate or severe allergic reactions22 (section 1.5).
• And large numbers of sheep suffered illness and death when grazing on post-harvest Bt cotton plants23 (section 1.6). |
| Shift away from GM food in the United States 2007
A coalition of food manufacturers, distributors, and retailers in the natural products industry, along with the Institute for Responsible Technology, launched an initiative in the spring of 2007 to remove GM ingredients from the entire natural food sector. Called the Campaign for Healthier Eating in America, this comprehensive initiative will educate consumers about the health risks of GM foods and promote non-GMO brands through shopping guides. |
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