Score a Point for Food Conglomerates 1 - aka How We Are Being Tricked into Eating the Dreaded Transfats

Photo credit: Mr Miyagi's Flickr account.

There's an interesting list over at A Calorie Counter - 10 Surprising Foods That Contain Trans Fat.

The foods on the list aren't entirely surprising. Most of the items are foods which we readily recognize obviously contained Trans Fats before the dreaded lipid's recent outing as entirely evil for your body. Breakfast cereals, cookies, crackers, microwave popcorn.

Most of this stuff I threw out of my pantry months ago - and I haven't looked back. Once you stop eating food from boxes, it becomes increasingly hard to imagine how it's even appealing, let alone bring oneself to mentally blank out all the terrible things learned about the origins and make up of such foods.

Alas, as difficult as imagining myself currently eating these foods, it IS easy for me to forget that these foods are staples in household pantries across North America, and that many of these foods are eaten by dieters and fed to children. Which I think the information in this post is particularly appalling, and serves as a good reminder that no matter how comfortable you are with food from 'the middle aisles' one should never trust the claims companies make on labels, and one should always read the ingredients if they want a true understanding of what they are about to eat...


Now mind you, the post was written with American FDA standards taken into consideration, and because I haven't done the research, I have no idea if food companies are getting away with the same or similar practices up here in Canada. I suspect they probably are.

When the FDA came up with guidelines to follow in regards to listing trans fats in foods, in decided that trans fat content only needs to be listed in the nutrition information if the trans fat content in the food is more than 0.5 grams of trans fat or more per 'serving'.

Essentially, if a food contains 0.49 grams of trans fat in what the company decides is any given products 'serving size', the food can list the trans fat content as 0 grams in the nutrition facts on the label.

This of course, gives the food industry all sorts of abilities to hide trans fats in our foods including tweaking suggested serving sizes to smaller amounts so that the trans fat content is under this threshold (keeping in mind that pretty much no one ever eats the 'recommended single serving size' for a food such as chips or cookies)and putting dubious large labels on the food such as 'Trans Fat Free!' or 'Zero Grams of Trans Fat per Serving!', leading consumers to believe that what they are eating is ACTUALLY trans fat free.

So how do we know if a product claiming to be trans fat free is actually free of these fats? The FDA website contains a direct quote, explaining exactly that.

"Consumers can know if a food contains trans fat by looking at the ingredient list on the food label. If the ingredient list includes the words "shortening," "partially hydrogenated vegetable oil" or "hydrogenated vegetable oil," the food contains trans fat."

And there you have it.

Read your labels people! It's the only way we can ever know for sure.

Score one for the big guys.

Big Food 1 - The People 0

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First Post

If you’re reading this post, then you’ve either stumbled here accidentally or perhaps you’ve actually enjoyed my blog enough to read through its entire history. Either way, hello!

I first got to thinking about ‘food issues’ a few years ago, after reading David Suzuki’s ‘From Naked Ape to Super Species’ and Eric Schlosser’s ‘Fast Food Nation’. At the time, I was a raised meat-eater, loved coke (particularly the diet variety), indulged frequently in greasy take-out, and while I had mild interests in political and environment realms, I’d never really contemplated the ‘politics’ of food.

My interest started with concerns about GMO agriculture and the impact of commerical farming on the environment, on the future of food, on the family farm. I read newspaper articles on the possibilities of cloning farm animals with keen interest, attempted to incorporate more organics into my diet, and that was that. As time progressed, and I changed from an unstable 22 year old - with a party lifestyle and an asshole boyfriend - to a financially secure, loving my desk job, much more grown up 24 year old, something changed. Suddenly I’ve found myself reading labels, ordering food related books (not just cookbooks!) off of Amazon, asking for kitchen accessories for Christmas, and boring my new, completely not an asshole boyfriend with my excited rants about topics like community gardens and new vitamin supplements.

To be clear - I’m still a meat eater (sometimes). I’m no vegan or vegetarian, and as much as I’d like to, I don’t eat organic all the time, and I have no idea what ‘macrobiotic means’. But I live in a city with expensive organic grocery stores, vegan bakeries, raw food cafes, wheatgrass juice joints, and gourmet supermarkets selling everything from soy cheese to $250 dollar loaves of flown-in-daily french bread. This same city has one of the fastest growing homeless populations in North America, a ghetto without so much as a foodbank (they closed it down 2 months ago), a workforce addicted to Starbucks’ lattes and Tim Hortons donuts, and a distinct lack of the local outdoor community markets I found plentiful on a recent trip to Europe. Add to all of this fear mongering about everything from mad cow disease, processed soy, obesity, salmonella infected spinach, cancer, bad supplements, diet fads, hormones in milk, and the shipping costs of the strawberries I ate in December that must have come from somewhere sunshiney and warm (and therefor faraway) and it’s hard not to wonder… what’s a girl to eat?

This isn’t (strictly) a recipe blog, or a prentious foodie critique of restaurants most of us can’t afford to go to - though there will be some recipes, and some reviews. This is mostly a place for me to share my interests, spread some news, and most importantly, a place to help me figure out just what the hell I’m doing - and bring along a few others for the ride.

Cheers,

J

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