HappyLifestyleJournal
We often buy products that are marketed as healthy and nutritious, but the reality is not always in agreement with these marketing scams.
There are so many things food producers don’t tell us – the food we buy is often of much poorer quality than we think, and sometimes we are buying something completely different from what we thought we were buying.
For example, cheese isn’t really cheese, or meat that isn’t really entirely meat but soy and a little bit of meat, or “organic” products that are actually GMO.
Read on to find out the shocking truth that food producers don’t tell us!
You think you’re buying extra virgin olive oil, but it may in fact be rancid. Many of the olive oils we see in supermarkets, if tested right now, wouldn’t pass the test as extra virgin. The University of California conducted a research which included many olive oil brands, and they found that many of them overstated their quality, and the olive oil was of lower-grade than it was written on the label. This is an actual fraud – the declaration says one thing, but the reality is something entirely different.
The research also found that around 70% of the oil bottles in the supermarket were rancid or didn’t meet the criteria to be graded as extra virgin. One of the researchers, Dan Flynn suggested looking for a dark glass or tin container when buying olive oil, because that kind of package will protect it from light and it will not become rancid as likely. Also, it is advised to check the harvest date which should be written on the bottle, to make sure it is still good for use.
Many products that you think are sugar-free actually contain disguised sugars. When you read the label of a particular product to see if there is sugar, you probably often look for the actual word ‘sugar’, but what you maybe don’t know is that sugar goes around by many names, and you should learn them all in order to protect yourself from being scammed into believing that something you are eating doesn’t contain sugar, when it actually does, and a lot.
Of course, if you’re not so worried about your sugar intake, this doesn’t mean much to you, but for diabetics or those on a diet, this is a very important thing. Other names for sugar that you should be looking out for are: high-fructose corn syrup, dextrose, cane crystals, evaporated cane juice, fruit juice concentrate, glucose syrup, etc. Of course, not all these ‘words and phases’ actually mean sugar, but some of them, as fruit juice concentrate, contain a lot of sugar in them.
When you buy cheese, it maybe isn’t cheese at all. Some ‘cheeses’ you buy in a supermarket don’t even contain traces of cheese. These products are actually called ‘pasteurized prepared cheese products’, because according to the FDA, they cannot be called cheese if they are not that.
The producers of this product want to make the production as inexpensive as possible and the process simple, so they take out some of the milk and put some protein concentrate (milk or whey) instead, as Melanie Warner (the author of Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal) told Reader’s Digest.
Multigrain and whole-grain are not the same thing. Not all grains are healthy, but many people think their nutrition is very good if they eat grains. We’re not saying grains are bad, but there are some that are not as healthy as you think. When you read ‘multigrain’ on the label of a product you immediately think ‘oh, that means this is good for me’, but don’t mistake multigrain with whole grain.
Multigrain usually means that the product contains many different grains, but they don’t necessarily have to be whole, as Liz Vaccariello , the editor in chief of Reader’s Digest explained. If you want to eat healthy grains rich in fiber, multigrain products are usually not the way to go. Instead, look for ‘whole grain’ written on the labels, as those are the grains you should be eating if your goal is to eat healthy.
Sometimes farmed salmon is better than the wild one. We often hear and read how we should avoid farmed salmon, and that we should opt for wild salmon as often as possible, but this isn’t necessarily true.
As Robert J. Davis who holds a Ph.D. in health policy said – if you get farmed salmon from a place that has been careful about its source, it isn’t a bad choice, and according to some studies it can even have a slightly larger amount of omega-3s than wild salmon, and we know how healthy those fatty acids are for the heart.
Natural flavoring isn’t always so natural. Many producers put ‘natural flavor’ on the label of their product, but they actually pack it with artificial ingredients. You just can’t always trust what they put on labels.
The founder of the New Primal, a grass-fed beef jerky company, Jason Burke was shocked when other food producers asked him what he was using for preservation, and when he didn’t state any artificial ingredient they told him, “You know you can use X or Y – just call it natural flavoring on the package. No one will know.” This only testifies about the truthfulness of declarations.
There are many unlabeled ingredients in packaged foods. Scientists often find traces of pesticides in foods, and some ingredients that are transfered from the food packaging into the food.
For example pieces of cardboard can get into the food, and the same goes for plastic, from which an industrial chemical that can cause various health problems, called BPA, gets into the food and poisons it (and us).
Basically, the safest thing to do would be to try to eat whole foods as much as possible and be careful about where you get your food from.
