We all know the Food Industry can be shady–anybody who listens to the news can tell you that. We have, as a nation, been generally introduced to the idea that the food industry is corporate and does some not so above-board stuff, as the highly corporate tend to do. However, what the average person doesn’t know is that there’s a whole lot more to the shadiness than meets the eye. Think of it as the tip of a shadiness iceberg: concerning, but only the beginning of all the things to be concerned about. This is especially true when it comes to a thing and and industry so universal: we all gotta eat, so when the food industry pulls unfair, deceptive, and even dangerous stuff, it affects us all. Here are 15 things they definitely do not want us to know:
More processing generally makes food less healthy.
As we know, processed foods are pushed on the American consumer regularly. This is because they are more profitable to corporations: it makes more money for companies to turn government subsidized crops like corn, wheat, and soybeans into processed food products than to push for fresh fruits and vegetables. This is one of the main reasons–if not the main reason–that our grocery stores are full of highly processed food products. A lesser known fact, however, is that more processing generally tends to make food less healthy–in fact, astronomically so. In fresher, less processed foods, naturally occurring proteins, fibers, phytochemicals (which protect against heart disease and diabetes), antioxidants (which protect against cancer) and probiotics (which promote healthy gut microbial life) provide a wide range of life-sustaining nutritional materials. The products derived from processing commodity crops (aforementioned corn, wheat, and soybeans, among others) tend to be higher in calories while being much, much lower in nutritional value, often lacking those essential vitamins, minerals, probiotics, fibers, and phytochemicals we need to stay healthy.
“Healthy” marketing is misleading.
You see it all the time: foods, especially processed foods, attempt to lure the well-meaning consumer in with claims that make it sound like they’re somehow a healthy choice. Phrases like “zero trans fats”, for instance, do not guarantee that an item doesn’t contain other sorts of harmful fat (such as saturated fat), as well as sugar and additional chemical additives. This is true even on a visual level: fruit snacks, for instance, will feature pictures of fresh, juicy apples, grapes, and oranges on the box, and will say they’re “made with real fruit”, when in fact, in the vast majority of cases, the main ingredients are corn syrup and sugar with some (if any) juice concentrate thrown in. “Made with whole grain” is a particularly prevalent red flag: many products will advertise as “made with whole grain”, when, in fact, the sugar content is far higher than the whole grain content. If the whole grain is not the first ingredient listed on the box, you can disregard that “whole grain” promise.
Pretty much all your food is owned by a handful of companies.
seriouseats.com
If you go to the supermarket, you are met with what seems like a huge variety of choices–almost to an overwhelming extent. We have rows and rows of different offerings when it comes to pretty much any sort of food. But the reality of who is behind your food when it comes to ownership and production is very different. Though it appears that there are many different companies and brands out there, huge parent companies tend to own almost every brand on the market, with the little brands as subsidiary properties. Take cereal, for instance. When you go to the cereal aisle in the supermarket, there are tons of different cereals to choose from. We’ve probably all been in a bind where we had trouble choosing what we want on our breakfast tables. However, almost every single one of those cereals are owned by one of four companies (Kellogg Co., General Mills, PepsiCo, and Post Foods). Those four companies control 80% of all cereal sales–and are actively looking to expand all the time, meaning that if you manage to find a cereal outside their grasp, it’s more than likely that said cereal will soon be owned by one of them. This makes competition and quality control harder to regulate, since production power is so overwhelmingly relegated to so few companies.
Just because something is “fat free” or “low fat” doesn’t mean it’s necessarily healthy.
lifehacker.com
One of the main diet trends in the past 10-20 years is reducing fat intake in your diet. The less fat, this trend says, the better–and, as usual, the food industry has noticed that trend, and has profited from it. Many foods market themselves as low fat and even fat free, and there are even low fat and fat free versions of popular fatty snacks. However, the fat free/low fat trend is actually misleading. While it’s good to avoid excess fat intake (especially when it comes to saturated and trans fats), good, unsaturated fats are actually healthy and necessary for your body. Additionally, when food corporations take fat out of a food, they still have to make it taste good. They do this by adding extra sugar, sodium, or artificial flavorings: if you look on the nutrition facts of most low-fat or no-fat options, they’ll usually have way more sugar or salt than their full-fat counterparts. This cancels out any potential benefit of not having excess fat, and actually makes the food less healthy.
Food companies market junk to kids.
usrtk.org
The United States is experiencing an obesity epidemic on an unprecedented scale–and some of the hardest hit by that epidemic are children. Childhood obesity has doubled in children and nearly tripled in adolescents in the past 30 years. What food companies don’t want you to know is that they are directly and purposefully marketing obesity-causing junk food to kids, despite the risks involved. According to the American Public Law Center, food marketing to children has been identified as playing a key role in the national obesity crisis. The Law Center found that calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods are targeted to children and teenagers through a wide range of marketed channels, in “nearly every environment where a kid might study, play, hang out, or eat”, through packaging, giveaways and contests, product placement in movies, TV shows, and video games, through digital media, and through viral marketing. In 2009, food and beverage companies spent $1.79 billion to market their products to kids, seventy-two percent of which went to marketing breakfast cereal, fast foods, and sugary sodas.
The government subsidizes that junk.
wisegeek.org
Food companies are certainly acting to put as much fast food and junk food out there as possible, but the sheer amount of their production is only made possible by government subsidies. A federal corn subsidy of upwards of $7 billion encourages farmers to overproduce, meaning that farmers get paid a certain price by the government, even if they flood the market with corn. This means that there’s a whole lot of corn in the market, more than could be used naturally, so the government offloads the corn to food manufacturers at super low prices. Because they have all this extra corn at such low prices, food companies are motivated to find ways to use the corn, creating products that they know will sell. What products are those? Junk foods. If you look at any given junk food, a corn-based product or byproduct is almost definitely within the top three ingredients.
The food industry uses very harmful pesticides.
newstarget.com
The food industry is responsible for the use of a TON of pesticides–approximately 1.1 billion pounds of the stuff each year, to be exact. What the food industry doesn’t tell you is that those pesticides also get introduced into the environment outside of the crops, due to the imprecise way the pesticides are applied (especially when it comes to very large fields of high volume crops). The pesticides developed these days are extraordinarily potent, and only need a tiny amount of any given chemical to kill an insect, but when it comes to high volume crops, producers have to cover a huge area with pesticides to make sure every part of every plant is covered. This means that all the rest of the pesticide particles, beyond the relative few that wind up warding off the bugs, get leached into the environment, or is left as residue on food. Environmentally, this leads to ecological disruption through the destruction of useful predators and parasites, leading to major outbreaks of secondary pests. Pesticides being left on food and ingested has lead to acute poisonings, as well as long term health risks that include cancer and reproductive, respiratory, and cognitive side effects.
Food companies hide sugar in your food under different names.
oakvillefamily.com
We all know that we should avoid eating too much sugar–that’s standard nutritional information, and the diet and health conscious know to check a nutrition facts label to see how much sugar is in a given food item. However, what most people do not know is that producers in the food industry know that people are sugar conscious, and so many of them hide extra sugar in the product under a different name. Examples include high-fructose corn syrup, cane crystals, dextrose, evaporated cane juice, agave nectar, and fruit juice concentrate–all of which are basically just sugar. Especially in cases where a food has quite a bit of sugar as a main ingredient, some companies will intentionally use two or more different types of sugar (aka, sugar with different names) so that they don’t have to make sugar number one on the ingredients list. The FDA has proposed a change that would require manufacturers to add up all the types of sugar as one, but there is little chance that it will pass, considering the sizable strength of the sugar industry and the food industry at large.
Meat preservatives are carcinogenic.
jamesrussellingerfelt.wordpress.com
Much of the meat consumed by Americans is of the processed variety: bacon, hot dogs, cold cuts, et cetera. In any given supermarket, you will find an extensive processed meat selection–even in supermarkets where fresh meat is not available. If you’re familiar with processed meat, you know they can stick around for quite awhile without rotting. This is due to preservatives–specifically, nitrate and nitrite. Those preservatives are also where the pretty much uniform color and flavor of lots of processed meat comes from. Shockingly, there has been research dating back almost 40 years that indicates that nitrate and nitrite become nitrosamines in the body–aka, compounds that cause cancer. In 2015, the World Health Organization declared processed meats a Group 1 carcinogen, the highest risk category that exists. Researchers identified links from processed meats to pancreatic, colon, and rectal cancers–a 2008 American Institute for Cancer studies found that just one hot dog a day increases the risk of colorectal cancer by 21%. Something to think about next time you’re at a BBQ…
Shrimp pose significant health and safety risks, and are bad for the environment and workers.
seriouseats.com
When you think of the problems with the food industry in America, you don’t generally think about shrimp, but you definitely, definitely should. This is true for a number of reasons. For one, the majority of shrimp (around 90%) sold in the US is neither domestic nor wild-caught. Instead, they’re imported from countries in Southeast Asia (mainly Thailand, Indonesia, and parts of India), where they’re farmed in incredibly dirty, crowded pools, and where they use harmful disinfectants and antibiotics, many of which are illegal in the US. You might think that this is where the FDA would step in, but, shockingly, over 96% of shipments of imported shrimp aren’t even opened or checked when they arrive in the US. Compare that to the European Union, which inspects somewhere between 30-50% of their seafood imports. High-volume shrimp farming is also bad for the environment (it is very resource-draining, and harms sensitive mangrove forests), and bad for the workers involved in the process: a recent AP expose found that slave labor was being used in the an unsettling number of Southeast Asian shrimp farms.
There are tons of antibiotics and various other drugs in many of the animals you eat.
sacfirm.com
Most people are aware that antibiotics are sometimes used in the process of factory farming, to pack on as much weight as quickly as possible onto the animals, and to prevent the animals from getting sick in the unsanitary conditions common among factory farms. That alone is problematic, but many don’t understand the full extent of antibiotic use, and the fact that it’s only getting worse. A number of governmental regulations and prohibitions on the use of antibiotics in animals have been repeatedly shut down by lobbies for the egg, chicken, turkey, milk, pork, and cattle industries. Though the use of antibiotics Cefzil and Keflex was almost prohibited, the lobbies shot the proposal down. Though a later ruling limited the use of the antibiotics to “health” rather than simply growth reasons, the food industry simply manipulated what could be considered “health” reasons–as evident by the fact that the sale and distribution of those antibiotics has increased by 57% since 2009. The problem is especially documented in chicken: a recent study by Johns Hopkins took feather samples to see what drugs the chickens received before slaughter, and came back with residues of many banned antibiotics, as well as caffeine, acetaminophen (Tylenol’s active ingredient), diphenhydramine (Benadryl’s active ingredient), and fluoxetine (Prozac’s active ingredient.)
The red coloring in many foods comes from crushed bugs.
beingmark.com
Have you ever seen super red foods and wondered, hm, how is it that they make that color so vivid? Probably, and the answer is going to make you wish you’d never wondered in the first place. That’s because the red color in many foods actually comes from crushed insects. Yup, you heard me right. Actual crushed bugs. If you ever see carmine, carmine gum, or cochineal extract in an ingredients list, it means you’re eating at least a little bit of crushed bug powder. The alternatives that the food industry used to use for red coloring were chemicals Red No. 40 and Red No. 3, both of which were derived from petroleum, and both of which were linked to health problems such as hyperactivity in children and cancer in animals. So basically, the food industry is offering you a choice: would you rather be poisoned by petroleum-based chemicals, or eat bugs? Fun!
Many “cheese products” aren’t actually cheese.
stripersonline.com
The dairy aisle at the supermarket is always packed full of all sorts of cheese–but it turns out, a whole bunch of that alleged cheese isn’t cheese at all. Many “cheese products” (especially when they are labeled as such) aren’t actually cheese: large-scale dairy producers, in order to save money during the “cheese” production process, replace milk with processed milk protein concentrate, or whey protein concentrate. This technically means they cannot call the resulting product cheese (according to the FDA), hence the legally mandated term “cheese product”. This includes processed sliced cheese, cheese sticks, and some shredded brands. It should also be noted that, because of government subsidies, dairy farmers are encouraged to overproduce milk–which, along with chemicals, technology, and a subsidized corn-rich diet, results in lots and lots of cheap milk (for reference, an industrially farmed dairy cow can produce up to six gallons of milk a day, while the normal grass fed cow produces only around 1.5 gallons.) That cheap milk (which can contain antibiotics and bovine growth hormone, among other things) is regularly used in the production of most “cheese products”, and contains very little beneficial dairy nutrients.
Many “high fiber” products are stuffed with fake fiber.
poster.forteachers.org
These days, everybody is about fiber, and that’s great: fiber is great for your digestive system, which is great for your body and health as a whole. Unfortunately, the food industry has caught on to that trend, and frequently tries to make money off of peoples’ interest in incorporating fiber into their diets without actually, you know, putting fiber where they say they are. Many products that advertise themselves as “high in fiber” are actually stuffed and padded with fake fiber–synthetic products which, though they can technically, legally call fiber, are nowhere near as healthy as naturally occurring fiber in whole grains and vegetables. In fact, synthetic-made fibers may actually be detrimental to your health: in some people, they cause bloating, gas, and general gastrointestinal distress. If you’re trying to avoid that, watch out for chicory root, maltodextrin, and polydextrose on the ingredients list of foods, especially those that advertise themselves as “high fiber”.
Your Extra Virgin olive oil is probably lesser grade oil.
oliveoilexcellence.com
Picture this: you’re trying to get on that Mediterranean diet kick, so you go to the store and shell out for some extra-virgin olive oil. It costs more, but you hear it’s healthier, and at least it’s going to be a purer, higher quality oil than its less expensive counterparts, right? Well, hate to break it to you, but you may have just been scammed by the food industry. According to research done by the University of California, Davis, Olive Center, approximately 70% of all bottles of extra-virgin olive oil were actually lesser grade oils. Because the average consumer wouldn’t be able to taste the difference right away, importers and domestic marketers of olive oil often cut oil advertised as one hundred percent extra virgin with less pure oil, or just swap out the entire bottle for a lower grade oil and hope (often successfully) that no one will notice.
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