Lucky Charms Tops List of Healthiest Breakfast Choices

Recently, I signed my name to a petition that was sent to various cereal manufacturers. I wanted them to know that I strongly oppose them in their fight against a proposed, voluntary set of nutrition guidelines for foods that are marketed specifically to children. These guidelines contain recommended guidelines for calories, unhealthy fats and sodium for foods marketed to kids, as well as minimum thresholds to ensure that the foods provide things of value to kids' diets like fruit, vegetables or whole grains.

Remember that I said these proposed guidelines are voluntary, they can be adopted or ignored as each company sees fit. In response, the food industry has developed their own, far inferior set of nutrition standards for foods marketed to kids. The really strange thing is that even though the proposed guidelines are completely non-binding and contain no regulatory force of any kind, they are pulling out all the stops to get the government to withdraw their marketing recommendations. Following is a letter that I received from General Mills (my comments in bold).

Thank you for your email regarding the Interagency Working Group proposal.  Please allow me to respond. Your email notes that we have lobbied against the Interagency Working Group (IWG) proposal.  That is correct.  We have serious concerns about the IWG proposal. 

Our most advertised product is cereal – and we stand behind it. Cereal is one of the healthiest breakfast choices you can make (Reese's Puffs, Cookie Crunch and Lucky Charms are at the top of my list of healthy foods).  Ready-to-eat cereal has fewer calories than almost any other common breakfast option (fewer calaries and zero nutrition). Cereal eaters consume less fat, less cholesterol and more fiber than non-cereal eaters.  If it is a General Mills cereal, it will also be a good or excellent source of whole grains (whole grains to start that have been cooked to mush, high heat dried and forced through a sieve to create fun shapes and then sprayed with vitamins and nutrients as there is nothing nutrionally left after processing).

Childhood obesity is a serious issue – and General Mills wants to be part of the solution.  But if the issue is obesity, cereal should perhaps be advertised more, not less (yes, because more artificial, processed ingredients with sugar and trans fat is THE solution to childhood obesity).  Because frequent cereal eaters tend to have healthier body weights  – including people who choose sweetened cereals. It’s true of men. It’s true of women. It’s true of kids.
 

Data published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association, based on the U.S. Dept. of Health and Human Services’ National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), found that frequent cereal eaters tend to have healthier body weights overall, including kids who eat sweetened cereals.  To be precise, kids who eat four to seven servings of cereal over a 14-day period are less likely to be overweight than kids who eat fewer than four servings of cereal. Kids who eat cereal more frequently, or more than seven times in 14 days, are even less likely to be overweight than kids who eat cereal less frequently. (As compared to what....non breakfast eaters, those eating bacon and eggs, poptarts, pancakes and syrup?)

Another study published in the Journal of the American Dietetic Association followed 2,000 American girls over a 10-year period.  It found that girls who demonstrated a consistent cereal-eating pattern had healthier body weights and lower body mass index (BMI) than those who did not. (Again as compared to what? You cannot make a broad sweeping statement like that without context.)

General Mills’ ready-to-eat cereals are America’s number one source of whole grain at breakfast, and fortified cereals provide more iron, folic acid, zinc, B vitamins and fiber than any other conventional breakfast choice.  Eating cereal also has the added benefit of promoting milk consumption (milk treated with antibiotics and hormones and pasturized at such high temperatures that it has a shelf-life of forever).  Forty-one percent of the milk children consume is with cereal – and the figure is even higher for African American and Hispanic children.

Many things have been written about the proposed IWG guidelines in the media and–many misstatements have been made. You can be assured than food and beverage companies have studied every letter, comma and period in the proposal.  We know what it says, and what it does not.  For example, we know that 88 of the 100 most commonly consumed foods and beverages could not be marketed under the IWG guidelines.  The list of “banned” items under the guidelines would include essentially all cereals, salads, whole wheat bread, yogurt, canned vegetables, and a host of other items universally recognized as healthy (Thunderous applause!!!! Maybe we will finally get real, healthy food versus the processed garbage you and other companies like you produce). 

Despite the characterizations used to advance them, the IWG guidelines would not be voluntary, in our view.  The IWG guidelines are advanced by two of the agencies most responsible for regulating the food industry, as well as the agency most responsible for regulating advertising.  Ignoring their “voluntary guidance” would not be an option for most companies.   Regulation has already been threatened (even demanded) should companies choose not to comply – and litigation would inevitably follow. It's about time the food industry was held responsible for the lies and cover ups that have been propagated upon us for years.

The IWG guidelines also conflict with most existing government programs and definitions relative to food.  For example, many products that meet the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s current definition of “healthy” could not be advertised under the IWG guidelines.  Many products included in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program fail the IWG standards, as do most products encouraged and subsidized under the USDA’s Women, Infants and Children Feeding Program (WIC) (probably because they are processed garbage to begin with).  Even low-calorie, nutrient dense foods of the type specifically encouraged by the U.S. Dietary Guidelines broadly fail to meet the unique stringency of the proposed WIG restrictions.  In fact, it is readily apparent that the new IWG guidelines have no parallel whatsoever – from a nutrition or science standpoint – with any other U.S. government food or nutrition program (again, thunderous applause!!!! It is time to move away from BigAG and the status quo).
Curiously for guidelines purportedly developed to address obesity, the IWG guidelines fail to include any reference to calories. The inexplicable omission of a measure as important as calories also works to the disadvantage of cereal products (that's what this is really about isn't it, the poor light with which cereal will truly be shown), which are inherently low-calorie, nutrient-dense foods (low calorie does not necessarily mean healthy).  Importantly, this is true of both unsweetened cereals and sweetened cereals, because both tend to have roughly equal numbers of calories per serving – most being about 120 calories per serving – whether sweetened or not.

Finally, your email suggests companies should focus on providing feedback via public comment.  We agree.  We have reviewed every detail of the IWG proposal – and we remain opposed, as our public comment explains. Thank you again for your email, and for allowing us the opportunity to respond.

Sincerely,
       
Tom Forsythe
Vice President, Corporate Communications
General Mills


Here is the ingredient list for Reese's Puffs:

INGREDIENTS:
Corn (whole grain corn meal), sugar, Reese's creamy peanut butter (roasted peanuts, sugar, contains 2% or less of: mono- and diglycerides, peanut oil, salt, molasses and corn starch), dextrose, modified corn starch, canola and/or rice bran oil, corn syrup, salt, Hershey's cocoa, tricalcium phosphate, calcium carbonate, red 40, yellows 5&6, blue 1 and other color added, trisodium phosphate, zinc and iron (mineral nutrients) vitamin C (sodium ascorbate), a B vitamin (niacinamide), artificial flavor, vitamin B6 (pyridoxine hydrochloride), vitamin B2 (riboflavin), vitamin B1 (thiamin mononitrate), vitamin A (palmitate), a B vitamin (folic acid), vitamin B12, vitamin D, wheat flour, vitamin E (mixed tocopherols) and TBHQ added to preserve freshness. Contains Peanuts and Wheat ingredients. Two questions - 1) If this cereal is made from "whole" grains and is so healthy, why does it need to be fortified? 2) Where is the healthy in this ingredient list?

I guess I don't need to tell you that my blood was boiling after I read his response. Please tell me what you think.

See the Preliminary Proposed Nutrition Guidelines here.

This Post was shared on Real Food Wednesday.

The Truth About Your Food - Taco Bell Mexican Pizza

The next post in the series, The Truth About Your Food (see Doritos, see Skittles, see Subway 9-Grain Wheat)...

What's really in...Taco Bell Mexican Pizza = 540 calories, 30g fat (8g saturated), 1,020mg sodium.
It's Italian, it's Mexican, it's...well, it's got a whopping 64 different ingredients, so it's hard to tell just what exactly it is. On the face of it, this meal doesn't look too bad. There are two pizza shells, ground beef, beans, pizza sauce, tomatoes and three cheeses. Nothing alarming, right? Even the nutritional vital signs, while high, compare favorably to most fast-food pizzas. It only gets scary when you zoom in on what it takes to stitch those pieces together. That's when you see all of those 64 smaller ingredients, including an astounding 24 in the ground beef alone. Yikes!

Now, some of those ingredients amount to little more than Mexican seasonings and spices, but there are also loads of complex compounds such as autolyzed yeast extract, maltodextrin, xanthan gum, calcium propionate, fumaric acid and silicon dioxide. Any of those sound familiar? The last one might - if you've spent any time at the beach. But chances are you normally refer to it by its common name - sand.

That's right, sand is made from fragmented granules of rock and mineral, and the most common of them is silicon dioxide, or silica. This is also the stuff that helps strengthen concrete and - when heated to extreme temperatures - hardens to create glass bottles and windowpanes.

So, why exactly does Taco Bell put sand in the Mexican Pizza? To make it taste like spring break in Cancun? No quite. As it turns out, Taco Bell adds silica to the beef to prevent it from clumping together during shipping and processing. The restaurant uses the same anti-caking strategy with the chicken, shrimp and rice.

I "love" this letter from Taco Bell...they justify adding spices and chemicals that they conveniently label "other ingredients" because plain ground beef from CAFO farms tastes boring. Perhaps if they used a better quality of meat - the kind raised humanely, grass fed without antibiotics, hormones, etc. - it wouldn't be necessary to add their "12% secret recipe".

SOURCE:
David Zinczenko

The Truth About Your Food - Subway 9-Grain Wheat

To continue in the series, The Truth About Your Food (see Doritos, see Skittles)...

What's Really in...Subway 9-Grain Wheat (6") = 210 calories, 2g fat (.5g saturated), 410g sodium
Okay, so you're probably not in the habit of ordering a la carte bread loaves at Subway, but there's a good chance you've eaten at least a few sandwiches built on this bread. The good news is that Subway actually delivers on the nine-grain promise. The bad news: eight of those nine grains appear in miniscule amounts. If you look at a Subway ingredient statement, you'll find every grain except wheat listed at the bottom of the list, just beneath the qualifier "contains 2% or less". In fact, the primary ingredient in this bread is plain old white flour and high-fructose corn syrup plays a more prominent role than any single whole grain. Esentially this is a white-wheat hybrid with trace amounts of other whole grains like oats, barley and rye.

So, outside the nine grains, how many ingredients does Subway use to keep this bread together? Sixteen, including such far-from-simple ingredients as DATEM, sodium steroyl lactylate, calcium sulfate and azodiacarbonamide. But here's one that's a little unnerving: ammonium sulfate. This compound is loaded with nitrogen, which is why it's most common use is as fertilizer. You might have used it to nourish your plants at home. And Subway does the same thing; the ammonium sulfate nourishes the yeast and helps bread turn brown. What, did you think that dark hue was the result of whole grains? Hardly. It's a combination of the ammonium sulfate and the caramel coloring. Seems like Jarod might frown on that sort of suberfuge.

From Examiner.com:
Subway's 9 Grain Bread:
You may think that the bread that they make in house would be considered fresh, right? Think again. Here is a list of the ingredients for a piece of their 9 Grain Bread, which sounds oh-so-hearty. My annotations are in bold type to help you understand what this food is really made of:
Enriched wheat flour (wheat flour, barley malt, niacin, iron, thiamin mononitrate, riboflavin, folic acid) (anytime a flour is enriched, it means that the food manufacturer has stripped the flour of nearly all the vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants, so they are legally bound to introduce back in the synthetic vitamins) , water, yeast (source of MSG, and a common allergen), high fructose corn syrup (need I say more? a cause of blood sugar imbalances and weight gain), whole wheat flour, wheat gluten, contains 2% or less of the following: oat fiber, soybean oil (Genetically Modified), salt, wheat bran, rolled wheat, rye nuggets, dough conditioners (DATEM, sodium stearoyl lactylate), yeast nutrients (calcium sulfate, ammonium sulfate), degermed yellow corn meal, rolled oats, rye flakes, caramel color (contains cancer-causing nitrates, and is GM), triticale flakes, parboiled brown rice, refinery syrup, honey, barley flakes, flaxseed, millet, sorghum flour, azodiacarbonamide (Use of azodicarbonamide as a food additive is banned in Australia and in Europe. In Singapore, the use of azodicarbonamide can result in up to 15 years imprisonment and a fine of $450,000), natural flavor (another source of MSG) (maltodextrin, natural flavor, silicon dioxide, lactic acid). Contains wheat.

Subway's Oven Roasted Chicken Patty:
Oven roasted chicken with rib meat (conventionally produced with growth hormones, pesticides, antibiotics), water, seasoning (corn syrup solids, vinegar powder [maltodextrin (GM sugar syrup, source of MSG), modified corn starch & tapioca starch, dried vinegar], brown sugar, salt, dextrose (a sugar derived chemically from starch), garlic powder, onion powder, chicken type flavor [hydrolyzed corn gluten (MSG!), autolyzed yeast extract (MSG!), thiamine hydrochloride, disodium inosinate & disodium guanylate]), sodium phosphate.
That chicken sure went through the ringer, didn't she? Bathed in MSG (a flavor enhancer that is a nuerotoxin used to make mice obese for diabetes trials in labs). Lathered in sugar.

Subway anyone???

SOURCE:
David Zinczenko
Natalie Pescetti

The Truth About Your Food - Skittles

Continuing with my series, The Truth About Your Food (see Doritos)...

What's Really in Original Skittles...1 pack = 250 calories, 2.5g fat (saturated), 47g sugar
They're sweet, chewy and brightly colored. Now, what are they? Well, the basic formula for each chewy neon orb is a gross mashup of sugar, corn syrup and hydrogenated palm kernal oil. That explains why every gram of fat is saturated and each package has more sugar than two twin-wrapped packages of Peanut Butter Twix.

So, those three ingredients plus a few extra fillers are basically all it takes to get the general consistency and flavor, but to achieve that color spectrum, Skittles brings in a whole new list of additives. When a Skittles ad tells you to "taste the rainbow", what it is really telling you to do is taste the laboratory-constructed amalgam of nine artificial colors, many of which have been linked to behavioral and attention-deficit problems in children, which prompted the Center for Science in the Public Interest to petition the FDA for mandatory labels on artificially colored products. The FDA's response: we need more tests.

In the meantime, there's a very large-scale test going on all across the country, and every Skittles eater is an unwilling participant. And that doesn't even factor in the blood-sugar roller coaster you go on when you ingest a Skittle's bag worth of sugar.

SOURCE:
David Zinczenko

The Truth About Your Food - Doritos

Men's Health editor in chief and author of the series Eat This Not That, David Zinczenko, wrote an article -The Truth About Your Food. It's really interesting information and had a huge impact on me long before I began my Real Food journey.

What's Really in Nacho Cheese Doritos...11 chips = 150 calories, 8g fat (1.5g saturated), 180mg sodium
The concept is, well, sort of brilliant: nachos and cheese without the hassle of a microwave. Or even a plate, for that matter. You just tear open the bag and start snarfing. And as a parting gift, Dorito's leave your fingers sticky with something that looks like radioactive bee pollen. Now here's the question: Do you have any clue what's in that stuff? Here you go -

To create each Dorito, the Frito-Lay food scientists draw from a well of 39 different ingredients. How many does it take to make a regular tortilla chip? About three. That means that some 36 ingredients wind up in that weird cheese fuzz. Of those 36, only two are ingredients you'd use to make nachos at home: Romano and cheddar cheeses. Alongside those are a cache of empty carbohydrate fillers like dextrin, maltodextrin, dextrose, flour and corn syrup solids. Then comes a rotating cast of oils. Depending on what bag you get, you might find any combination of corn oil, soybean oil, cottonseed oil and sunflower oil. Some of these will be partially hydrogenated, meaning they give the chip a longer shelf life and spike your heart with a little shot of trans fat. (The reason you won't find this on the label is that FDA guidelines allow food manufacturers to "round down" to zero.)

And then, after the fats and nutrionally empty starches, there's a seasoning blend, which includes things like sugar, "artificial flavoring" and a rather worrisome compound called monosodium glutamate. Monosodium glutamate, or MSG, is the flavor enhancer largely responsible for the chip's addicting quality. The drawback is that it interferes with the production of an appetite-regulating hormone called leptin. A study of middle-aged Chinese people found a strong correlation between MSG consumption and body fat. What's more, the FDA receives new complaints every year from people who react violently to MSG, suffering symptoms like nausea, headaches, burning sensation, numbness, chest pains, dizziness and so on. Talk about radioactive bee pollen.

SOURCE:
David Zinczenko

Stop Childhood Obesity!

Childhood obesity is reaching epidemic proportions. Nine out of ten commercials shown during Saturday morning television promote foods of poor nutritional quality (Center for Science in the Public Interest and the University of Minnesota). And with names like Kid Cuisine, Kool-aid and Danimals, is there any question that these food giants know exactly what they are doing? Kids represent an important demographic to marketers and the companies they represent - $2 billion dollars a year to be exact. Kids today have their own purchasing power, influence their parent's buying decisions and are the adult consumers of the future.

Big Food Companies continue to undermine the efforts of parents to teach and instill traditional and healthy eating habits in their children. Meanwhile, the Federal Trade Commission is working to establish voluntary, newly-proposed guidelines aimed at promoting more healthful foods for children. And guess who is fighting these new voluntary guidelines tooth and nail???? Big Food - Dannon, General Mills, Hershey's, Kellogg's, Kraft, McDonald's, Nestle, PepsiCo, Sara Lee and Unilever. These same food companies are calling these voluntary guidelines "irredeemable," "counterproductive," "unnecessary" and "monumentally flawed." They're promoting their own weaker set of guidelines instead AND trumpeting a bogus study that predicts economic disaster if these proposed standards - which are voluntary - are adopted.

Please join the Environmental Working Group and the Center for Science in the Public Interest to get the attention of the CEOs of large food manufacturers and tell them to stop their attacks. Demand today that these food companies use their resources to market healthier food to our children! Stand up to Big Food on behalf of our children, they deserve nothing less! Sign the petition here.

SOURCES:
ScienceDaily.com
CommercialAlert.org
Environmental Working Group

Modern Milk is Frankenfood

Sadly, what we consume today as "milk" is not your grandmother's milk. Like most of the other overly processed foods available on grocery shelves today, milk has been altered, stripped and reconstituted. There are so many additives and processes involved that buying a gallon of milk (or a cup of yogurt) at your grocery store guarantees that you'll get a mixture of substances from all over the country - possibly the world. When all is said and done, the product that you actually purchase is a far cry from what actually came from the cow.

Homogenization - John Bunting, a dairy farmer who researches and writes about dairy for The Milkweed, says "homogenization is not good". "The milk is pumped under high pressure which smashes the milk molecules so hard. Homogenization splits and exposes the molecules." The hard science goes like this: A raw milk molecule is surrounded by a membrane, which protects it from oxygen. Homogenization decreases the average diameter of each fat globule and significant;ly increases the surface area. Because there's now not enough membrane to cover all of this new surface area, the molecules are easily exposed to oxygen, and the fats  become oxidized.

Milk Solids - Critics believe that milk solids, which are sometimes added back into the milk, contain oxidized, or damaged, forms of fat and cholesterol. Nonfat milk solids are created through a process of evaporation and high heat drying which removes the moisture from skim milk. Exposure to high heat and oxygen causes fats to oxidize. And oxidized cholesterol has been shown in numerous studies to lead to atherosclerosis, or hardening of the arteries, and to raise LDL, aka "bad" cholesterol. One study from 2004 found that oxidized dietary fats are a "major cause" in the development of atherosclerosis.

This phenomenon worries Nina Planck, author of Real Food. "This damaged cholesterol is much different than what I call "fresh cholesterol," which is found in egg yolks, whole milk, and butter," she said. "We know that fresh cholesterol has one main effect and that is to raise HDL [or ‘good' cholesterol]. On the other hand, oxidized cholesterol raises LDL." What's more, Planck says that the law does not require manufacturers to tell consumers when milk solids are in food or milk. "It's a [potential] scandal because it's unlabeled," she says.

Michael Pollan writes about this as well in In Defense of Food: "In the case of low-fat or skim milk, that usually means adding powdered milk. But powdered milk contains oxidized cholesterol which scientists believe is much worse for your arteries than ordinary cholesterol." In California, where the industry reports the ingredients on its website, all industrially produced milk contains nonfat milk solids. Even "whole milk" is a product of reconstitution; it contains at least 3.5 percent milk fat and 8.7 percent nonfat milk solids. This is also true for (industrially produced) organic milk.

Are these milk solids really as big of a problem as Planck and others in her camp believe them to be?  Lloyd Metzger is doubtful. He says there's virtually no fat left in the milk to oxidize. Bunting agrees, "If it's skim milk, there might be small amounts - but that's not a real concern. If you're worried about oxidized fat, it's homogenization that is the real culprit." Has Bunting seen evidence of the health impacts associated with oxidized fats in milk? "No," he says. "But who's going to fund it? The USDA is the largest funder of dairy research in this country and they're not going to fund a study they don't want to hear about."

Milk Protein Concentrates (MPCs) - MPCs are made using ultra-filtration - milk is forced through a membrane to remove some of the lactose. MPCs have less carbohydrates and more protein than other milk solids and are often used in protein bars and drinks as well as in some processed cheeses Nonfat milk solids are approved for food use, but MPCs are not considered GRAS (generally regarded as safe) by the FDA. "MPCs have undergone a change," says Bunting. "They cannot be reconstituted into anything called milk." He suspects that the protein in MPCs is not as digestible as that in milk, but it has never been tested. He says Kraft, in particular, uses a lot of MPCs.

Lorraine Lewandrowski, a fourth-generation dairy farmer in Newport, N.Y., is also concerned about MPCs. "MPCs are derived from milk, but they're not really milk," she said. "There have been a lot of complaints by farmers concerned about MPCs being added to cheese to boost production." She says that typically around 10 pounds of milk yields one pound of cheese. MPCs - many of which come from overseas - can increase yields considerably. The MPC's are being imported from countries such as New Zealand, Mexico and China and "we cannot trust foreign governments with the safety of these ingredients", says Planck.

Milk doesn't have to contain nonfat milk solids, MPCs, or any other additives. Mark McAfee, founder of Organic Pastures, offers an alternative in California. "What is in our bottle comes straight from grass-fed, pasture-grazed cows. All we do is chill it and test it," he said.

In the New York region, where the sale of raw milk is illegal, small dairies leave their milk unhomogenized and pasteurize it at low temperatures to avoid damaging the milk molecules. "The real issue is trust," Bunting said. "If people could buy from someone they trusted, we wouldn't even need pasteurization. It extends shelf life, but it's not a safer product."


I don't know about you, but I want my milk (butter, cream, cheese, yogurt, etc.) to come from that cow right there...




SOURCES:
Grist.org
RealMilk.com
Why Modern Milk is Bad for You

This post was shared at Real Food Wednesday.