As I’ve mentioned before, my degrees are in Food Science… which means I was trained to work in the food industry.  That I didn’t end up there is really a quirk of fate.  While most of my fellow students moved into jobs with Pillsbury, General Mills, General Foods, RJR Nabisco and other well-known companies,  I stayed with the university to do research; crossing the aisle (so to speak) from applied science to pure. 

Nonetheless, I’ve retained my interest in food/food processing issues… which is why it sometimes drives me nuts to see articles from various wannabe gurus and nutrition writers ranting about the evils of  ”processed foods.”  I understand the point(s) they’re trying to make, but their definition of  “processed food” is very different than mine.  When they talk about “processed food”, they mean the high-sugar/high fat, low fiber, high sodium, additive-rich snack/convenience/junk faux foods so many people know and love.  But this is NOT an accurate definition.

So what’s a processed food?  ROFL!  It would actually be easier to ask, “what ISN’T a processed food?”  Truth is, outside of the whole, intact veggies and fruits in the produce bins, just about everything edible in the store is a “processed food”… “organic” or “all-natural” notwithstanding.

Don’t believe me?  What about that bag of natural, old-fashioned oatmeal?  Well, the oats have to be harvested, cleaned, heated, hulled, cut and flaked/rolled before they’re dispensed into units for sale.  Natural peanut butter?  Same deal.  The harvested peanuts have to be sorted, cleaned, washed, shelled, roasted, blanched, debittered, and ground before they end up in those familiar jars you see on the store shelves.

Get the picture? Even foods we think of as ”natural” are put through the wringer before they end up in the familar store box, jar, bag or bin. They’re all PROCESSED – and they have to be.  Many of them would be inedible (or simply unavailable) if they weren’t.  Whether you like the idea or not, our society runs on processed foods.  We live on what author James Burke calls “technology islands”… our way of life would be impossible without the miracle (yes, miracle!) of processed foods.

So does this mean processed foods are actually healthy?  Not necessarily.  The real issue we need to focus on is the degree of processing.  But processing itself isn’t inherently a negative… Instead, of uncritically demonizing “processed foods”, we need to look at individual products, and see what’s been done to them.

This should clear up any lingering questions about Aspartame…

Expert advice is that aspartame – found in more than 4,000 products – is safe to consume.

However, a number of people have reported sensitivity to the product including headaches, dizziness, vomiting, diarrhoea and fatigue.

…Professor Stephen Atkin, who will lead the new research, said: “This study is not to determine whether aspartame can be consumed safely; this has already been established, but rather to see whether certain people are sensitive to it.”

The Hull team hope their work will lead to a larger international study to pin down the issue once and for all.

…Andrew Wadge, Chief Scientist at the Food Standards Agency said: “The study will address consumer concerns, including anecdotal reports that have linked a range of conditions to aspartame.

Personally, I’ve never had any problems with aspartame, nor have I known anyone who has.  It’s certainly not hard to find reports of adverse effects, however.  It will be interesting to see if there are genuine chemical sensitivities behind these reactions.

There are times I’m alternately fascinated and repelled by the stuff the food industry comes up with.  On the one hand, I can’t really object to entrepreneurs pushing healthier versions of not-so-healthy-but-extremely-popular food products… but on the other hand, it seems somewhat exploitative too.  Marketing better quality  junk/snack/convenience foods as “healthy” implies that consumers don’t really have to change their eating habits… just their product choices.  In other words, they can have their cake and eat it too… or in this case, pizza.

The gut health market is growing, driven predominantly by yogurt shots from household names like Dannon, but if the vision and plans of a New Orleans-based archaeologist-turned-entrepreneur come to fruition, the gut-health market could soon be colonized by pizzas.

Naked Pizza started in 2006 and is the brainchild of Jeff Leach, an archaeologist by trade and head of Paleobiotics Lab, a New Mexico-based independent research group investigating the implications of dietary and nutritional evolution and its bearing on modern health.

…The pizza crust is formulated with 12 types of whole grain, including amaranth and buckwheat, and fortified with Beneo Orafti’s Synergy1 prebiotic, and Ganeden’s heat resistant Bacillus coagulans strain, said Leach.

A two-slice serving delivers a Bacillus coagulans payload of one billion colony forming units (cfu) and five grams of Synergy1, he said.

If you’re going to eat pizza, then one with added whole grains, prebiotic fiber and probiotic bacteria will certainly be superior to what Pizza Hut or Papa John’s has to offer, although I’m politely skeptical that palliatives like “Naked Pizza” will ultimately “change the health of the nation.”

But, we’ll see.  The company recently got a major boost from the Kraft Group, and is planning to expand nationwide.  If a franchise eventually opens nearby, I’ll have to check it out. 

Just like “natural“, “wholesome” is a marketing buzz word.  It conveys the impression of “healthy”, but in a noncommittal sort of way.  So it’s always worth reading the fine print, to make sure an allegedly “wholesome” food product really merits the description.

Like Kraft’s new, “wholesome” Lunchables, for example.

But I invite you to scan the rest of the ingredients in the new Turkey + Cheddar Sub Sandwich Lunchables. Does it look “wholesome” to you? Kraft has managed to turn a simple turkey and cheese sandwich, something every caretaker able to buy a Lunchable ($3.49) can easily afford and quickly slap together to stick in a lunchbox, into a chemistry set. Just reading the list of ingredients — I stopped counting at 119 — is exhausting; perhaps they figure we’ll just give up.

…But as for that lovely “spring water,” Kraft takes its time mentioning the artificially sweetened drink mix that comes with it. The touted 2 percent cheddar cheese turns out to be “2% milk reduced fat cheddar pasteurized prepared cheese product.” And about that “bread made with whole grain.” Would that be the white wheat bran that appears far down the list of the bread’s ingredients, long after the “enriched bleached wheat flour”?

The WaPo writer isn’t kidding about the ingredients.  Here’s the list.  In addition to the deficiencies she mentions, I couldn’t help but notice that there’s only 11g of protein, vs. 32g of sugar (more than 1/3 of the total cals).  Ugh.

In this case, “wholesome” appears to mean “better than the original ‘Lunchables’” – but that’s not saying much.  And considering what they charge for the damn things, you’ll be better off making your own school lunches for your kids.  They’ll be better off for it, too.

Last year, I blogged about the new “Smart Choices” labelling system instituted by the food industry to “…help Americans make smarter nutrition choices and improve public health.”  It looked ok – in theory - but I couldn’t help noting…

It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out…the criteria used for the labelling looks sound enough, but the devil is always in the details.  The list of participating companies is practically a “Who’s Who” of mega-junk food manufacturers/marketers, after all…

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Needless to state, I rarely stroll down the cereal aisle at the supermarket… it’s been years since I’ve eaten anything more processed than old fashioned rolled oats.  Roald Dahl neatly summed up my opinion of most ready-to-eat breakfast cereals in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”…

“Do you know what breakfast cereal is made of? It’s made of all those little curly wooden shavings you find in pencil sharpeners!

It’s only a slight exaggeration.  As far as I’m concerned, most of ‘em are fortified junk food.  So I’m definitely with the author of this Washington Post article…

Kellogg’s has reformulated its Rice Krispies and Cocoa Krispies cereals, fortifying them with vitamins A, C, and E and a bunch of B vitamins. The boxes and ads now tout that “each and every box” of Krispies has ingredients that “help support your child’s immunity.”

…Rice Krispies aren’t the worst cereal in the world. They’re pretty low-calorie and less sugary than most. But to suggest to parents that feeding them to kids will help protect the little ones against disease — and that’s what they mean when they talk about “boosting immunity” — seems absurd.

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Ok, not the beer itself…it’s the yeast the beer’s made from. According to this detailed article in Wired Magazine, a microbrew from the Fossil Fuels Brewing Company in Northern California is being made with a re-animated strain of Saccharomyces cerevisiae extracted from fossil amber from the Eocene epoch. Not exactly “Jurassic Park”, but close…

Evidently, the brew is pretty good, too: there’ve been several “thumbs up” reviews.

I’ve never been a big beer drinker, but I’d love to try it…I’m a science nerd, after all.  Unfortunately, it’s not being distributed outside of Northern California yet.  But who knows?  The hubby and I are considering a short, end-of-summer vacation… and a beer/wine-tasting tour of Northern CA might be just the ticket.

(h/t Slashfood)

Introducing Coca-Cola Freestyle, the soda fountain of the future.

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Introducing the new “Wheaties Fuel”…

Testosterone swirls around every aspect of Wheaties Fuel’s introduction. General Mills — maker of the most popular brand, Cheerios, and the second-largest cereal manufacturer, behind Kellogg’s — used a panel of only male athletes, including the Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning and the Boston Celtics power forward Kevin Garnett, to consult on both the nutritional profile and flavor.

From that, the company produced three prototypes of Wheaties Fuel. Samples are going out to about 1,000 “everyday athletes,” primarily Men’s Health readers who volunteered online. By popular vote, those readers will choose the winner, which will be announced Sept. 9; for a few months, the cereal will be available only online, and will be in supermarkets in January.

…The three prototypes bear little resemblance to the original Wheaties, a basic wheat flake: all are much sweeter than the original (each are 25 percent sugars by weight, compared to original Wheaties, at 15 percent). Two contain clusters that have a cinnamon-roll-like flavor and a third has raisins, cranberries and almonds. A cup, without milk, contains 210 calories, compared to 133 in the original Wheaties.

This is a great development, because we all know men require even more sugar and calories in their diets, right?

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In the course of surfing the NYT this morning, I stopped to read a short review of Dr. David Kessler’s book, “The End of Overeating”.  One point in particular really leaped out:

Planned and structured eating and understanding your personal food triggers are essential. In addition, educating yourself about food can help alter your perceptions about what types of food are desirable. Just as many of us now find cigarettes repulsive, Dr. Kessler argues that we can also undergo similar “perceptual shifts” about large portion sizes and processed foods. For instance, he notes that when people who once loved to eat steak become vegetarians, they typically begin to view animal protein as disgusting.

The advice is certainly not a quick fix or a guarantee, but Dr. Kessler said that educating himself in the course of writing the book had helped him gain control over his eating.

(emphasis mine)

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I was idly surfing though the Natural Products Insider site (an online trade publication) today, and stopped to read an article about the recent ”All Candy Expo” in Chicago.  Despite the “down” economy, apparently candy is still dandy…evidently over 2,000 new products were introduced and attendance was up by 7%.

But my eye was caught by these paras:

Which got me to wondering if there were any healthy candies being showcased. Sure enough … well, at least candy with “healthful” flavors such as acai, pomegranate and green tea. And a few wholesome and/or organic snack mixes.

But then this caught my attention: BrightSpot Brands (great name, isn’t it?), The World’s First Nutritionally Enhanced Candy Company. Its Gimme line of bite-sized candies delivers a substantial dose of calcium, omega-3 and probiotics. The company is owned and operated by Tim O’Connor, who, after a great career marketing fruit snacks with General Mills and launching Tropicana’s Pure Premium Plus OJ, decided to be an entrepreneur with a mission. That is, to use candy as a delivery vehicle for health and nutrition.

Candy as a “delivery vehicle for health and nutrition”???

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As most everyone knows by now, the partially-hydrogenated oils used in commercial food products are high in unhealthy trans-fats.  Now that trans-fats must be disclosed on nutrition labels (at least in places where they’re not banned outright), many manufacturers have replaced them with natural sources of saturated fat. 

Palm oil is one of those substitutes. It’s a highly popular cooking oil worldwide that’s high in saturated fat, so it’s a natural replacement for partially-hydrogenated oils.

There’s only one problem: although palm oil is technically ”trans fat-free”, according to an article in the USDA’s Agricultural research magazine, it may be just as heart-unhealthy for some people as the trans-fat-laden oils it’s replacing.

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This is kinda off the wall…

So what’s for dinner in 2022? A new report released by Britain’s Food Ethics Council last month identified some of the possibilities – more food grown in allotments, more functional foods – and in vitro meat, meaning meat that’s been grown from animal stem cells as opposed to meat cut from a carcass.

When reports of meat grown experimentally in the lab by Dutch researchers first surfaced a few years ago it seemed a bit far fetched, but not any longer. Two years ago an international group of scientists formed the In Vitro Meat Consortium, and last year the Norwegian Food Research Institute hosted a conference to discuss the challenges of producing in vitro meat commercially. If it does reach supermarket shelves, say researchers, it could help solve a few problems, like lessening the impact of livestock production on the environment, helping to prevent foodborne diseases, and reducing the need for millions of animals to be factory farmed.

One organisation working to produce meat from cell cultures is New Harvest which makes it clear that the technology now being developed could create processed meats like hamburger or sausages, but that the know how to create an in vitro steak or a chop doesn’t exist – at least, not yet.

Now, I’ve done a ton of cell/tissue culture work, and am familar with quite a few of the high tech manipulations used to create food products…and this still struck me as pretty weird…very ”Sci Fi.”  But, it has its compelling aspects too, w/respect to environmental issues and the humane treatment of livestock animals. 

Under the circumstances, I guess my answer to the question at the end of the article, “Would you eat an in-vitro burger?” is “Yes”.  If they can come up with commercially viable products, I’d be willing to give ‘em a shot…as long as they’re nutritious and taste good, that is.

The health/fitness supplement industry has an uneasy relationship with the FDA – to say the least.  Thus, it was no surprise to see a link to this news item getting passed around, so people could have a laugh at the agency’s expense…

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About a month or so back, I reported on my experience with a McDonald’s grilled chicken salad. It was truly the most pathetic salad I have ever encountered and still remains so. I was most disappointed at the effort Mickey-Dees was making in providing real alternatives to the usual high-calorie, high fat offerings. The salad was, plain and simple, a joke.

At the time, I remembered Wendy’s competitive offerings in a much more favorable light. Well, guess what? A recent road trip forced me to stop at a highway rest stop for sustenance.

And as luck would have it, this one featured a Wendy’s.

Game on!

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I’m proud of my food tech training and background.  Nonetheless, there are times when the food industry makes me want to scream.

Like today, after reading this industry article…

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Although my bio on the “About Us” page doesn’t mention it directly, I have an M.S. degree in Food Science from the University of California (Davis).  Most people I talk to assume “Food Science” = “nutrition” - but they couldn’t be more wrong…it’s about food technology.  As I once described it to a mechanic (who was confused by the concept), Food Science teaches you how to turn an ear of corn into a box of Corn Flakes, and ensure that every single box of Corn Flakes looks, tastes and crunches exactly like every other box. 

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I was perusing the LÄRABAR website today, as part of a review I’m writing for the Functional Food section.  They’re high quality, high fiber, whole food energy bars that taste pretty good, so I’m giving them a nice write up, for the most part.  But – like so many health/fitness-oriented supplement companies – they make specific claims for their products that they don’t back up with any hard data.  So, just for the hell of it, I sent off the following e-mail:

As a former Food Science major and current consultant/author on foods/nutrition, I am curious about the following statement that appears on your web site:

“The essential enzymes, which are necessary for the digestion and utilization of nutrients, remain completely intact in their most natural, powerful state.”

This, of course, implies that Larabars a) contain significant amounts of digestive enzymes (i.e., carbohydrases, proteases, lipases); and b) these enzymes actually enhance the digestion and utilization of the macronutrients present in the bar.

Do you have any supporting research? I would be very interested to know the activities that have been measured for the various digestive enzymes per bar (any one flavor will do); as well as any data that demonstrates that the measured enzymes are a) present in sufficient amounts to significantly affect digestion of the macronutrients in the bar; and b) active under the conditions present in the stomach and intestines.

Kind Regards,

Elissa Pratt-Lowe

I’m genuinely curious to see a) if I get a response at all; and b) what it will be. Personally, I think it’s soft-focus marketing hype, but I’m willing to entertain the idea that I could be wrong. Enzymes are quite identifiable, after all, and their activities are measureable. And now that General Mills owns the company, it’s not like they don’t have the resources available to do the appropriate tests. So we’ll see.

As many UltimateFatBurner.com visitors know, we have a new “Functional Foods” review section. I’m sampling as fast as I can, so the list of product reviews is getting longer…bit-by-bit.

At this stage of the game, many functional foods are on…the sweet side: beverages, flavored waters, bars, baked goods, shakes and such. I just read about one functional food in the making, however, that looks like an interesting departure from the trend…BioBeer.

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I’ve seen various protein customizers, like Protein Factory or True Protein, where you can create personalized nutrition/workout powders, but YouBars takes that concept one step farther…Customers can choose from a variety of ingredients and supplements to create their own, personalized nutrition/energy bars.

After years of being enthusiastic consumers of commercially available nutrition bars, L.A. mom Ava and her USC business student son Anthony got fed up with buying mass-produced bars that reflected generic tastes.

…We began making customized nutrition bars for the rest of our family and friends’ the response was great. (Dad didn’t even mind the messy kitchen!) We learned we weren’t the only ones fed up with eating mass produced bars. Almost everyone we knew lit up at the possibility of creating bars tailored to their own tastes and dietary dreams. And so You Bar was born.

It’s kind of a neat idea, although low-carbers will probably need to look elsewhere, as the emphasis is on dried fruits and natural sweeteners like honey and rice/agave syrups – no sugar alcohols or artificial sweeteners. Nor are the bars particularly cheap ($2.89 – $3.19 per bar). Still, if you’re interested in natural foods, and have a need for some “on-the-go” snacks, it’s an alternative to facing a shelf-full of bars, and having to flip ‘em over and squint at the fine print to see what’s inside.