“Don’t eat anything your great grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.” – Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food
Can you say aspartyl-phenylalanine-1-methyl ester really fast? Does butylated hydroxyanisole slip off your tongue easily? There is a new language evolving that is causing lots of tongue-tripping – although this one isn’t conceived in another country – it has been birthed on the shelves in your local supermarket! Certainly, our food supply has become complicated due to our stress-wrenching days and craving for convenience. In return for those handy pre-packaged edibles, we need to learn labelese to make sense of it all. Ironic isn’t it? We try our best to save time with convenient foods but then spend extra time having to learn what we are eating. Mastering the lingo can be difficult unless you’re a food scientist, nutritionist or chemist. Allow me to be your additive translator.
We eat approximately 1500 pounds of food a year, of which about 150 pounds is food additives. As defined by the FDA, food additives are any substance that results from “producing, manufacturing, packing, processing, preparing, treating, packaging, transporting, or holding food; and including any source of radiation intended for any such use.” With the average food traveling 1500 miles to your plate, you can only imagine the patchwork of additives your food has become by the time you take a bite.
My first rule of thumb is to keep your foods SIMPLE. I like to call these “naked foods” or foods without the dressing of plastic, cardboard, Styrofoam, foil, or glass. These unlabeled, additive-absent foods include fruits, vegetables, eggs, seeds, mushrooms, and nuts, and are commonly found in the produce section of supermarkets and food co-ops, and in farmer’s markets. Next in line would be foods with minimal amounts of pronounceable food additives such as high fiber crackers, whole grain breads, low-fat dairy products, yogurt, and cheeses. And finally, no need to check out the doozies, or what I like to call “anti-nutrition” since they deplete rather than give anything to our bodies – items loaded with chemicals usually preceded by the adjective “artificial” or “partially hydrogenated”. You’ve seen lots of these before: unthinkable unpronounceables high in sugar and fat – soft drinks, candy bars, toaster pastries, pre-made cakes, glazed donuts. I think you get the drift.
The food additive landscape isn’t too much different than a mine field. Most times, you don’t know what you’re in for, either health or harm. Some are healthy (e.g., added fibers and vitamins), others are neutral (e.g., phosphates and organic acids), and the remainder (e.g., artificial sweeteners and colorings, preservatives, white sugar) has little to be desired.
Here is a short list of the top 3 to avoid:
(1) Artificial ANYTHING (colors, flavors, sweeteners): “Artificial” denotes “not natural” which means that chances are our bodies won’t know what to do with them. These compounds have reputations for causing a rainbow variety of negative effects in the body, ranging from the red of inflammation to the blue of not being able to breathe.
(2) Trans fats (partially hydrogenated oils): These fats, created by the food industry, enables products to sit on shelves for long periods of time. However, these fats are seen by many as “the worst” fat ever since they lower our good cholesterol (HDL) and raise our bad cholesterol (LDL) – a double whammy!
(3) The preservative families: Nitrates and nitrites, sulfites, BHT/BHA – These preservatives may keep our food alive, but may make us feel life-less by giving us headaches, difficulty breathing, hives, nausea and digestive complaints. Some of them may even be cancer-causing, so beware!
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