by guest blogger Tyler Graham, coauthor of The Happiness Diet
1: Deciphering food label ingredients leads to unappetizing results. Take the innocuous-sounding castoreum, which is used to enhance the flavor of puddings, candies, and some frozen dairy desserts. You might be surprised to know that it's derived from beavers--beaver anal glands, specifically.
2: Many foods get their red coloring--"carmine"--from ground-up insect shells that can cause severe allergic reactions in some people.
3: The greater the number of cheap cuts of meat ground into a single patty, the greater the risk of contamination with E. coli. A standard fast-food burger contains the trimmings of dozens of cows raised around the globe.
4: According to research from UCLA, it takes only two months to lower levels of brain chemicals responsible for learning and memory (like BDNF) on a steady diet of processed foods.
5: Processed food is only as good as its packaging: In the summer of last year, Kellogg's recalled 28 million boxes of cereal because a compound in the box lining (the company wouldn't say what) was giving off a foul smell and tainting the taste of the boxed food.
6: The same company that makes metal detectors for airports also sells them to food manufacturers, who use the devices to test processed meats for stray wires, metal shards, and hypodermic needles.
7: The ingredients list for Strawberry Fruit Roll-Ups doesn't include...strawberries.
8: Animal feed given to factory-farmed cows contains rendered roadkill and euthanized cats and dogs, as well as plastic pellets as a cheap form of "roughage."
9: There are more than 80 ingredients in one Oscar Mayer Lunchables Breaded Chicken and Mozzarella sandwich.
10: The FDA allows 19 maggots and 74 mites in a three-and-a-half-ounce can of mushrooms.
Tyler Graham is the coauthor of The Happiness Diet. Previously, he served as the health and environment editor of O, The Oprah Magazine, the nutrition editor atPrevention, and the environment editor atBest Life. He recently launched a men's health section at Details magazine.
For more from Maria Rodale, go to www.mariasfarmcountrykitchen.com
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Let's hope that as healthy foods become more popular and widely available, we can still count on major natural food retailers such as Trader Joe's and Sprouts to do their due diligence, because we the public are not always able to. In any case, always read the label before you buy anything new, and decide if the ingredients are things you really want in your body!
And then I looked at the paper that #5 was linked to, the experiment mentioned in this article was actually done in rats (not humans) and took 3 weeks rather than 2 months. It doesn't mention evidence in humans. I'm sure the author of the paper at UCLA would have if the evidence has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. The paper in the link for #5 is actually a fantastic review of chemicals in foods that are necessary for cognitive functions, not the paper for the actual study mentioned in Maria's article. So she cited the wrong data and the wrong paper.
I feel like this goes back to the whole "too much of anything is bad for you" idea. If you eat too much processed foods, yes it's bad for you. If you eat too much healthy stuff, that can be bad also. If you drink too much water, yes you can actually die. The more important thing is to exercise regularly and don't be a glutton.
Oh yeah, this is why Huffpost doesn't do science.