Having done a bunch of research on how to feed myself better, it confounds me when I see advertising from huge companies that claim their products are just awesome for your body. Healthy food isn’t easy to sell as a mass-produced corporate product because it’s usually just plants. Not ground-up, pasteurized plant matter—whole, green plants. That you put in your mouth. Of course, highly perishable foods are tricky to sell on a corporate scale, and so the companies feed us with things that aren’t really food. Sometimes they have the nerve to brand their fake, gross foodstuffs as healthy, just so we can feel good about ourselves for eating them even when we’re really polluting our bodies. Here are some of the biggest offenders.
The bright colors, the stubby bottles, the all-lowercase copy on the label…Vitaminwater’s a trendy beverage to be sure. This nutrient-enhanced sugar-water packs fruit extracts, antioxidants, and huge helpings of vitamins to help its drinkers combat the swarming toxins of the outside world. A certain flavor claims to be a hangover cure, while another will apparently keep you from ever needing to take a sick day. And each colorful bottle is infused with a spoonful of sugar to help the medicine go down. Or make that several spoonfuls—eight, to be precise. Yes, Vitaminwater is packed with so much crystalline fructose (a corn syrup derivative) that it’s comparable to all the soft drinks we’re warned to avoid. The company is even a private subsidiary of the mother of liquid candy, the Coca-Cola Company. There may be some vitamins inside all the sweetness, but their effects are minimal compared to all the harm done to your body by ingesting liquid fructose on a regular basis. A steady influx of sugary beverages increases your risk for a whole bunch of nasty diseases. No naturally-derived acai-blueberry flavoring is going to prevent the development of type 2 diabetes. The Center for Science in the Public Interest even sued Vitaminwater in 2009 for claiming to be healthy. Coca-Cola laughed it off, claiming (essentially) that anyone who actually believed the rhetoric of their ad campaign was an idiot who deserved to die of complications from diabetes anyway. Zing!
Riding on the assumption that anything with whole grains in it is healthy, Quaker Oats markets most of their products as heart disease prevention. While it’s true that eating straight up oatmeal (garnished, maybe, with a little fruit and honey) is pretty good for you due to its high fiber content, throwing oats into candy bars doesn’t make them magical. Quaker’s Chewy bars are nuggets of oats and chocolate glued together with corn syrup. They recently stopped using high fructose corn syrup so that they can avoid the stigma associated with the highly processed sweet stuff, but all their granola bars still come glazed with regular corn syrup—which isn’t terribly much better for you. There’s also plenty of soybean oil holding this stuff together—a cheap oil that boasts a poor Omega 3 to 6 ratio. Not the best to put in your body. Quaker insists that a low fat content and a decent amount of calcium make these bars healthy—and at only 90 calories, they seem like easy snacks for those watching their weight. But watching calories only really counts if the calories you do put in your body are from good food, and sadly, these sugar-laden bars are little more than fiber-infused candy. Don’t waste your money on the prepackaged boxes of granola bars: make your own with fruit, nuts, and honey so you know they’re actually good for you.
Again with the oats. General Mills loves boasting the whole grain content of their many cereals. Cheerios especially are marketed as heart-healthy rings of magic that lower your cholesterol and allow you to live pretty much forever with your smiling family. Even the flavored Cheerios claim to be super healthy. But again, we’ve got a case of throwing something marginally healthful together with harmful ingredients. Just because something contains some amount of whole grains doesn’t make it magical. Those Honey Nut Cheerios? Those are basically tiny stale donuts in a bowl. Their second ingredient after oats is sugar, followed by modified corn starch, then finally honey. And after the titular honey comes more sugar in the form of brown sugar syrup. As for the “nut” claim, there’s some almond flavoring in there somewhere. Maybe your cholesterol will go down, but your blood sugar levels will spike if you eat this stuff on a daily basis. Sorry, GM—you don’t get to ride the healthy train with a one-way ticket to diabetes.
You see ads all over TV that claim that Kraft’s looking out for your kids. After all, their cheese products contain calcium and zero trans fat. But saying food doesn’t contain trans fat is sort of like saying it doesn’t have any asbestos in it: as in, we should hope it doesn’t in this day and age. It doesn’t speak to any kind of healthful property. And Kraft Singles, as slices of processed cheese products that maybe came from a cow once in some form, don’t really make the “healthy” cut based on their calcium content alone. You know what else contains calcium that doesn’t need to be boiled for hours in a smelly vat before you feed it to your kids? Spinach. Which contains tons of other nutrients and doesn’t have that plastic, gluey, scary consistency of fake yellow cheese.
So there you have it—you’re being lied to by food corporations all the time. But you probably already knew that. These days I try to only ingest things I can imagine being picked from the ground and eaten as-is (maybe cooked a little). It’s the only way I can ensure my food isn’t going to destroy me from the inside.
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