This Is Very Important....How Food Manufacturers Deceive Consumers!

This week, Consumers Advocate explores the most common deceptions used by food manufacturers to trick consumers with food ingredients lists. This careful research also contains useful tips for reading such labels with proper scepticism.

One of the most common tricks is to distribute sugars among many ingredients so that sugars don't appear in the top three.

For example, a manufacturer may use a combination of sucrose, high-fructose corn syrup, corn syrup solids, brown sugar, dextrose and other sugar ingredients to make sure none of them are present in large enough quantities to attain a top position on the ingredients list.

This fools consumers into thinking the food product isn't really made mostly of sugar while, in reality, the majority ingredients could all be different forms of sugar. It's a way to artificially shift sugar farther down the ingredients list and thereby misinform consumers about the sugar content of the whole product.

Another trick is to pad the list with miniscule amounts of great-sounding ingredients. Some companies pad the ingredients lists with healthy-sounding berries, herbs or super foods that are often only present in miniscule amounts. Having "spirulina" appear at the end of the ingredients list is practically meaningless. There's not enough spirulina in the food to have any real effect on your health. This trick is called "label padding" and it's commonly used by junk food manufacturers who want to jump on the health food bandwagon without actually producing healthy foods.

A third trick involves hiding dangerous ingredients behind innocent-sounding names that fool consumers into thinking they're safe. The highly carcinogenic ingredient sodium nitrite, for example, sounds perfectly harmless, but it is well documented to cause brain tumours, pancreatic cancer, colon cancer and many other cancers.

Carmine sounds like an ordinary food colouring, but it's actually made from the smashed bodies of red cochineal beetles. Of course, nobody would take strawberry yogurt if the ingredients "Insect-based red food colouring" is listed on the label. So instead, they just call it "carmine."

Similarly, yeast extract sounds like a perfect safe food ingredient, too, but it's actually a trick used to hide monosodium glutamate, MSG, a chemical taste enhancer used to excite the flavours of overly-processed foods without having to list MSG on the label. Lots of ingredients contain hidden MSG. Virtually all hydrolysed or autolysed ingredients contain some amount of hidden MSG.

Food names can include words that describe ingredients not found in the food at all. A "cheese" cracker, for example, doesn't have to contain any cheese. A "creamy" something doesn't have to contain cream. A "fruit" product need not contain even a single molecule of fruit. Don't be fooled by product names printed on the packaging. These names are designed to sell products, not to accurately describe the ingredients contained in the package.

There is no requirement for food ingredients lists to include the names of chemical contaminants, heavy metals, bisphenol-A, PCBs, perchlorate or other toxic substances found in the food. As a result, ingredients lists don't really list what's actually in the food, they only list what the manufacturer wants you to believe is in the food.

This is by design, of course. Requirements for listing food ingredients were created by a joint effort between the government and private industry (food corporations). In the beginning, food corporations didn't want to be required to list any ingredients at all. They claimed the ingredients were "proprietary knowledge" and that listing them would destroy their business by disclosing their secret manufacturing recipes. It's all nonsense, of course, since food companies primarily want to keep consumers ignorant of what's really in their products. That's why there is still no requirement to list various chemical contaminants, pesticides, heavy metals and other substances that have a direct and substantial impact on the health of consumers.

Food companies have also figured out how to manipulate the serving size of foods in order to make it appear that their products are devoid of harmful ingredients like trans fatty acids. In standard labelling any food containing 0.5 grammes or less of trans fatty acids per serving is allowed to claim zero trans fats on the label.

Exploiting this 0.5 grammes loophole, companies arbitrarily reduce the serving sizes of their foods to ridiculous levels, just enough to bring the trans fats down to 0.5 grammes per serving. Then they loudly proclaim on the front of the box, "ZERO Trans Fats!" In reality, the product may be loaded with trans fats (found in hydrogenated oils).

Credit: PM News