Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |  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 miniscule 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 miniscule amounts. | | Here are some additional tips for successfully decoding ingredients list labels:
Tips for reading ingredients 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. | | Having "spirulina" appear at the end of the ingredients list is practically meaningless. There's not enough spirulina in the food to have any real effect on your health. 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.
Hiding dangerous ingredients
A third trick involves hiding dangerous ingredients behind innocent-sounding names that fool consumers into thinking they're safe. | | 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. The actual amount of goji berries in the product is likely miniscule.
4. |
Michael Pollan
See book keywords and concepts |  Here's the complete ingredients list for Sara Lee's Soft & Smooth Whole Grain White Bread. (Wait a minute—isn't "Whole Grain White Bread" a contradiction in terms? Evidently not any more.)
Enriched bleached flour [wheat flour, malted barley flour, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate (vitamin B,), riboflavin (vitamin B2), folic acid], water, whole grains [whole wheat flour, brown rice flour (rice flour, rice bran)], high fructose corn syrup [hello!], whey, wheat gluten, yeast, cellulose. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |  You can hardly pick up an over-the-counter medication at a convenience store without seeing some scary chemical on the ingredients list.
The USDA, meanwhile, openly allows U.S. farmers to inject cattle with hormones and antibiotics that are banned in most other countries, and the agency even has an open policy of allowing U.S. cattle to be fed chicken poop, roadkill, euthanized pets, and until recently, brain and spinal fluids from other dead, diseased cows. So what happens when consumers eating this stuff suffer bizarre neurological disorders like the human form of mad cow disease? |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |  Most fabric softener products (dryer sheets), for example, are positioned as being at least somewhat Earth friendly thanks to a claim in the ingredients list that reads "Biodegradable fabric softeners." Unfortunately, the second ingredient in fabric softeners is "fragrance," and the fragrance chemicals are so highly toxic that they cause cancer in humans and are extremely destructive to aquatic ecosystems downstream. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |  The salt that shrunk my head
Other selections from the deli also listed yeast extract right on the ingredients list! To avoid all the bacon and yeast extract, I decided to buy some fresh tortilla soup made by apparently famous sisters who are producing soup under the Whole Foods brand. I bought a large container of the soup, took it home, warmed it up in a pan (I don't use microwaves), and took a sip.
The blast of salt caused my lips and half my face to shrivel into a human prune that looked like a shrunken head from the Jivaro tribe in Equador. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |  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
See article keywords and concepts |  Speaking of what's inside, here's the ingredients list: Agave nectar, Goji berries, Ecuadorian cacao powder (non-hybrid criollo variety), walnuts, Hunza raisins, coconut, dates, sesame seeds, black sesame seeds, maca powder, truly raw sun-dried vanilla powder, cinnamon, sustainably hand-harvested Himalayan crystal salt, cayenne pepper, and "lots of love."
You'll notice that just about every ingredient listed here is a superfood of one kind or another. This is truly a chocolate superfood product. Five stars, highly recommended.
Life Force (www.LifeForceLLC. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |  Supporting literature is also important to include, especially if it shows the ingredients list and nutrition facts (if applicable.)
How can we evaluate your product without the product inside? It's a two-stage process. If we like your product from the packaging, we will go out and buy a new bottle off the shelf, then use that for our review. We want to make sure we're testing the same product consumers might buy. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |  So we're putting together a new product focus effort that will bring you honest, independent reviews and recommendations on:
Nutritional supplements
Health foods / grocery store foods
Personal care products and makeup
Pet health products
Green living / green home products
Each product review will include the ingredients list, where applicable, plus our opinions and comments on whether the products should be purchased or avoided. Naturally, we won't charge companies for this editorial coverage, and our reviews will remain entirely independent and unbiased. |
Wendy Bazilian, DRPH, MA, RD, Steven Pratt, MD, Kathy Matthews
See book keywords and concepts |  Different foods have different details on their Nutrition Facts panel and ingredients list that become important depending on the type or category of food. What information you should pay particular attention to on these labels is not provided by food manufacturers or even many health-care professionals. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
See book keywords and concepts |  Other ingredients you may see on the ingredients list in a glucosamine-chondroitin formula may include sea cucumber (Cucumaria frondosa), grape seed extract, boswellia, and turmeric, all of which have varying degrees of anti-inflammatory action.
Exercise for Arthritis
You may feel like exercise is out of the question if you have arthritis. Not so. Moderate exercise can be your best friend—building strong muscles around the joints can go a long way toward relieving joint pain, not to mention the benefits exercise provides to overall endurance, well-being, and mood. |
Gayle Reichler, M.S., R.D., C.D.N.
See book keywords and concepts |  For example, if you look at the ingredients list below you will see that there is more sugar in this product than oil.
Ingredients List: whole-wheat flour, oats, skim milk, sugar, baking soda, vanilla, raisins, salt, oil.
If you're watching your salt intake, make sure salt is one of the last ingredients listed on the package. Before you check the ingredients list, you can also refer to the Nutrition Facts label as a guide. |
Jonny Bowden, Ph.D., C.N.S.
See book keywords and concepts |  The longer the ingredients list, the more calories you get and the less yogurt nutrition. In some highly sweetened containers of yogurt, you're getting more calories in the sweetener than you are in the yogurt. Be sure to read the protein and sugar values on the nutrition panel. The higher the protein and the lower the sugar content, the more actual yogurt you're getting in the container.
The NYA has been urging the FDA not to allow products that do not contain live and active cultures to be called yogurt. |
Jack Challem
See book keywords and concepts |  Again, scrutinize the Nutrition Facts box and the ingredients list of each packaged food.
The Big-Box Stores
Costco, Sam's Club, and Wal-Mart are the big-box stores, so named because of the size of the stores and the size of the food packages they sell. On the positive side, you can buy large quantities of produce, meats, chicken, and fish for a lot less money than the same products will cost you anywhere else. The stores have also begun to take some tentative steps toward stocking organic foods, but time will tell whether their discount-minded customers are willing to pay the difference. | | The Three Parts of a Food Label
Each box, bottle, jar, can, or bag of food contains three blocks of information: the package front, a Nutrition Facts box, and an ingredients list.
The package front, which describes the product, identifies what's in the package but, aside from that, consists mostly of advertising or graphics to catch your attention and persuade you to buy the product. It may contain any number of healthy-sounding statements, including "No Cholesterol," "Whole Grain," "Lite," "Low-Carb," and "No Trans Fats. | | Frozen foods are acceptable when fresh ones aren't available, but read the ingredients list carefully, and reject foods with unhealthy ingredients.
Food-Philosophy Principle #4. Don't Take Food for Granted
Over the last hundred years, many nations have made great strides in sanitation and hygiene, resulting in a food supply that is mostly free of disease-causing bacteria. We believe that the near elimination of bacte-rially contaminated food has led to a sense of complacency: if food is clean and free of germs that make us sick, it should be good to eat, right? | | For example, serving sizes may be deceptively small, and trans fats may be present even when the Nutrition Facts box claims that the product is free of them.
The ingredients list identifies, in descending order by weight, most or all of the ingredients that were used to make the product. Some ingredients, such as natural or artificial flavors, are extremely vague and could mean anything from sugar to monosodium glutamate. |
Peter h. Fraser and Harry Massey
See book keywords and concepts |  Every bottle of NES Infoceuticals carries the same few physical ingredients, so you can't tell them apart by the ingredients list. The differences are in the information encoded into them, so that Liver Driver, for example, is encoded with different information than Source Driver or Muscle Driver.
Peter and Harry's collaboration quickly bore fruit, and in July 2004 Peter relocated from Australia to England to work with Harry, who had returned home after more than a year in the United States. |
Jack Challem
See book keywords and concepts | | The irony is that a Nutrition Facts box and an ingredients list amount to red flags, usually indicating that the food has been processed. This doesn't mean the food is always unhealthy, depending on the extent of processing, but that it deserves a close look.
While we were researching food labels and supermarket foods for this book, we were aghast at the huge quantities of foods loaded with sugar, refined starches, trans fats, and way too much salt. | | To figure this out, we looked at the ingredients list, which includes canola oil. We happened to know that canola oil is mostly polyunsaturated and monoun-saturated fats, but the average shopper would not.
Cholesterol
The next line of the Nutrition Facts box indicates the amount of cholesterol, in milligrams (mg) per serving. Yet this information maybe a little deceiving. A cholesterol-free product may contain sugars, other refined carbohydrates, or trans fats, each of which can boost your body's production of cholesterol. |
Paula Begoun and Bryan Barron
See book keywords and concepts |  It takes only a quick look at the ingredients list on a cosmetic to notice that there are a lot of words that are completely unrelated to anything resembling a plant, much less a plant that can be labeled "organic." Plenty of synthetic ingredients are found in products of cosmetics lines that boast about their all "natural" and now "organic" content. Yet the hope and desire for healthier products will be an emotional pull for lots of women. |
Alex Steffen
See book keywords and concepts |  Here are a few tips to start you off: Be sure to read the ingredients list and not just the brightly colored ad box on the front of the package to learn which and how many of the ingredients are really organic. At the farmers' market, talk to the farmers and ask questions. Some farmers advertise their products as "transitional" instead of "organic," which means that they are in the process of eliminating pesticides and fertilizers. They may even be producing 100 percent organic goods, but without the stamp of government approval. It's worth it to be curious and to inquire about your food. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |  Granted, at least Galaxy Nutritional Foods explains what casein is in their ingredients list. It reads "casein (a dried skim milk protein)". So, there is some attempt on their part to educate consumers about what's in the product, but still, it's made with a milk protein derived from cows, and most people don't read the ingredients to begin with.
If you're into health food products, you can verify all this yourself. Visit any natural grocer or health food store and look at any veggie cheese or soy cheese product on the shelf. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
See article keywords and concepts |  This Fiberzon product is expertly formulated -- I'm impressed by the ingredients list, because it's obvious that this has been put together by someone who really understands intestinal health. For example, the product contains licorice root, fenugreek seed and hibiscus flower, and these ingredients eliminate parasites from your digestive tract, even beyond the healthful fiber effect of the psyllium husk.
Of course, you might think, gee, I don't have any parasites. But in reality, parasites are far more common than you might expect (even in people). |
The Editors of FC&A
See book keywords and concepts | | Carefully examine all food labels, and not just the ingredients list, for the word nut or peanut. Alert your waiter at every restaurant to the seriousness of your allergy. He can help make sure your meal isn't cross-contaminated. And be especially wary of restaurant desserts and home-baked goodies.
To add a satisfying crunch to dishes without touching a nut, mix in rice crispies, candy pieces, crunchy fresh vegetables, or dried fruit.
Milk. Dairy doesn't just come in cartons. Check labels because you may find these milk by-products in lots of foods: casein, sodium casemate, lactose, and whey. |
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FAIR USE NOTICE: The research quoted here is provided under the protection of Fair Use provisions and published by the 501(c)3 non-profit Consumer Wellness Center for the purposes of public comment and education. Authors / publishers may submit books for consideration of inclusion here.
TERMS OF USE: Read full terms of use. Citations of text from NaturalPedia must include: 1) Full credit to the original author and book title. 2) Secondary credit to the Natural News Naturalpedia as a research resource and a link to www.NaturalNews.com/np/index.html
This unique compilation of research is copyright (c) 2008 by the non-profit Consumer Wellness Center.
ABOUT THE CREATOR OF NATURALPEDIA: Mike Adams, the creator of this NaturalNews Naturalpedia, is the editor of NaturalNews.com, the internet's top natural health news site, creator of the Honest Food Guide (www.HonestFoodGuide.org), a free downloadable consumer food guide based on natural health principles, author of Grocery Warning, The 7 Laws of Nutrition, Natural Health Solutions, and many other books available at www.TruthPublishing.com, creator of the earth-friendly EcoLEDs company (www.EcoLEDs.com) that manufactures energy-efficient LED lighting products, founder of Arial Software (www.ArialSoftware.com), a permission e-mail technology company, creator of the CounterThink Cartoon series (www.NaturalNews.com/index-cartoons.html) and author of over 1,500 articles, interviews, special reports and reference guides available at www.NaturalNews.com. Adams' personal philosophy and health statistics are available at www.HealthRanger.org.
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