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Additives: Look Before You Eat
Part 2: Can you trust the labels?
To aid the consumer, Government legislation demands that packaged food should be packed and labelled with lists of ingredients and certain nutritional data. But how helpful is this really? Before the information on a label is of use, it must be intelligible to the reader. If you don't know how the decipher the codes, and I suspect many people don't, then they are of no use at all. How often do you walk into a supermarket, pick up the packaged item of food that you are considering buying and read the ingredients on the label? More importantly, if you do read them, are you thinking food or are you thinking chemistry. What are all those E numbers and chemicals? what are they for? and why are they in there? Would you, for example, buy a product whose label declared that its ingredients were:
Raspberry Flavour Jelly Crystals: Sugar, Gelling Agents (Carrageen, Dipotassium Phosphate, Potassium Chloride), Adipic Acid, Acidity Regulator (Cream of Tartar), Flavourings, Thickener (Carboxymethylcellulose), Artificial sweetener (Sodium Saccharine), Colour (Betanin).
Raspberry Flavour Custard Powder: Cornflour, Flavourings, Colour (Cochineal).
Trifle Topping Mix: Vegetable Oil (Hydrogenated), Sugar, Emulsifiers (Propylene Glycol Monostearate, Lecithin), Modified Starch, Whey Powder, Lactose, Caseinate, Thickener (Carboxymethylcellulose), Flavourings, Colour (Beta-Carotene).
Sponge Fingers. (There are no ingredients listed for these.)
Decorations: with Colour (Cochineal). (Again, no ingredients.)
A lot of people would — and do. Those are the ingredients of a well-known
Raspberry Flavour Trifle
Mix. If we look at these ingredients in more detail, some appear to be foods —
but are they?
Sugar and Lactose
are nutritionally poor, highly refined sweeteners which cause obesity, tooth
decay and
diabetes.
Vegetable Oil (Hydrogenated)
can be any vegetable oil, there is no way to tell which, but the word,
Hydrogenated, tells that it has been hardened artificially and that it is a
saturated fat laced with trans-fats.
Trans fats are known to be the major dietary cause of heart disease (although
saturated fats are generally,
but wrongly, blamed).
Whey Powder
is a cheap waste product used widely as a filler.
Modified Starch
; There is no way, from the packet label, to tell what this is. But generally
it is a cheap
cereal filler, to bulk the product out. Starch is a very useful bulking agent
but, untreated, it is difficult to
use. So scientists have devised ways of treating it with acids, alkalis and
oxidising agents to make it more
soluble, or heat resistant, or to give it a variety of textures. Like sugar,
these modified starches are high
in empty calories with little or no nutritional value.
The rest of the ingredients are largely chemicals with varying
degrees of toxicity from none to such
symptoms as hyperactivity, hypersensitivity, allergic reaction and even cancer.
When grandma made
trifles, she didn't use chemicals, her jelly contained fruit, she made custard
from eggs and milk, and the
topping was whipped real cream.
Through stories which occasionally appear in the media, people are
becoming aware that some food
additives are harmful: the yellow colouring, tartrazine (E102), for example has
been shown to cause
hyperactivity in children. But toxicity is only part of the additive problem.
They are also there to make
as big a profit for the manufacturers as possible. In many cases, those
chemicals are there to defraud. And
it's all legal.
The current trend for high-in-polyunsaturates margarines, followed
by ever lower fat, low-fat spreads is
a perfect example both of toxicity. Their toxicity and cancer-causing
properties are well known
but in modern margarines, with the current government backed propaganda to
reduce fat intake, we also
have the perfect climate for fraud. Mix the polyunsaturated margarine with
cheap, nutrient-poor waste
products such as skimmed milk or whey powder, or make an emulsion of it with
plain water, and you have
a low-fat spread. They even whip it up with air and call it something like
'lite'. It couldn't be cheaper
to produce and, since its price competes with that of butter, it can be sold at
a vast profit. The public is
buying rubbish and paying the earth for it. I can think of no reason why anyone
would want a low-fat
spread, but if you do, why not merely spread butter thinner? That would be
cheaper and it's a heck of a
lot healthier than any margarine.
Modern margarines are not the only forms of food fraud by a long
way. Many brilliant (and well paid)
minds are inventing new foods all the time. They hydrogenate fats; modify
starches, then thin or thicken
them to give a range of textures; they add emulsifiers, thickeners,
preservatives and antioxidants to stop
them going rancid, artificial flavours because they have no taste or the taste
is pretty foul, colourings to
make them more appealing, artificial sweeteners (several of which are known to
cause cancer), waxes,
oils, bleaching agents and improvers. Some of these additives are there to make
the gunge acceptable to
the buying public. Some is there so that it runs through the machines more
easily. The food content is
generally so poor that what you buy in most cases is an appetising-looking
product which is lacking in
real nutrients. In many cases you get no real food at all. Lemonade doesn't
contain lemons — even the
flavour doesn't come from lemons; cheese and onion flavour crisps contain no
cheese and no onion. The
food scientists can synthesise just about anything; and the ad-men can sell it.
And if they tell you it has
added vitamins and minerals, you are more likely to buy it — so they do. If it
were real food, however,
it wouldn't need to have vitamins and minerals added.
Then there's that great con where they get you to buy a product —
and you have to add your own food.
One classic is the fruit pie mix. They start with a homely name: 'Grandma's
Traditional Cherry Pie Mix',
put it in a package with an appealing picture, advertise it on commercial
television and it will sell like
the proverbial hot cakes. When you buy it and look at the ingredients and
instructions, you will read
something like: 'Cherry flavour pie mix — just add sugar, milk and eggs'. What
you have bought is a mix
of chemicals — you have to add the real food yourself.
There are a few clues if you know what to look for. In the trifle
example above, we see the words
'Raspberry Flavour'. The clue is in the word 'flavour'. The law allows the word
'flavour' to be used
when all that flavour is artificial. If it says 'Raspberry Flavoured Trifle',
however, there must be some
real raspberry in it — although there may not be much. If the label proclaims
'Raspberry Trifle' then
there will be more fruit, although again there may not be much. When artificial
flavours are used, the
manufacturers have some 6,000 to choose from; but you won't know what they are
because they are not
subject to any regulation and they won't be specified on the product's label.
And don't be fooled if the label tells you that the product contains natural
flavours. These will have come from a laboratory too.
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