Toxic Living – Is Your Food Just Food?

Other ingredients called incidental additives don’t even have to be listed on labels. They’re the substances that come into the food from the packaging and ingredients of other ingredients that are present at “insignificant levels” and have no “technical or functional effect.” Yes, it’s scary.

Natural and artificial flavors are also often grouped together under one name. The manufacturers do not have to disclose what “artificial flavors” really means unless it’s a food containing a major food allergen. These would include milk, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, fish, shellfish, soy and wheat, and the food ingredients containing the proteins derived from these.

Even worse, the statement “all natural” has no nutritional meaning. They can indeed include unnatural ingredients. It’s actually not required by law to have unnatural ingredients and still be called all natural. How messed up is that?

What does “free from” really mean?

It actually might just mean that there’s less than 0.5 grams per serving because the food manufacturer may round down to zero. Not to mention that you might eat more than one serving of something, as well as the fact that it is adding up over time too.

This is the same issue with transfat and partially hydrogenated oil. If it is less than 0.5 in one serving it is still listed as having no transfat. Yes, they are deceiving us.

What’s in a name?

Food manufacturers can use other names on a label so that we cannot recognize what’s really in there. For example, if you’re trying to avoid MSG, you need to look for all of the following terms, as they all contain MSG: autolyzed yeast, calcium caseinate, gelatin, glutamate, glutamic acid, hydrolyzed protein, monopotassium glutamate, monosodium glutamate, modium caseinate, textured protein, yeast extract, yeast food, and yeast nutrient.

Misleading ingredient claims.

Sometimes foods that claim to include healthy ingredients actually do not have them, or only have them in small amounts. Take, for example, the strawberry yogurt with no strawberries. The Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI) recently asked the FDA to immediately stop misleading food labels. Another misguidance are so-called wholegrain products that are mostly made from regular white flour with only very little wholegrain. They often contain high-fructose corn syrup as well, which makes them rather unhealthy instead of healthy.