Do you know – Most foods we eat aren’t real foods at all. Shocking???. Yes. That’s the truth. To confirm it, check the ingredients list on the label of that product.
Are you sure that’s food?
“Everything in moderation” is usually pretty sound advice, but let’s face it: Some things you should just not put in your mouth. From artificial flavors and colors to words you’d need an advanced degree in chemistry to pronounce, there are thousands of ingredients making their way into your food that are simply not, strictly speaking, food. (For more on that, see Prevention contributor and bestselling author Mark Bittman’s piece for us about how to eat.)
Bottom line: Even though you can buy these 19 foods at the grocery store doesn’t mean you should. Find out how many ingredients it takes to make a fake blueberry—and see what else made our list, to find out what should stay off of yours.
Cheese that aren’t Cheese
Cheese faking is an art nearly as popular as cheesemaking. All kinds of brands make not-cheese, but the classic is Easy Cheese. This “pasteurized cheese snack” is full of fillers, oil, and emulsifiers. The ingredients are so un-cheeselike that lobbyers tried to force Kraft to call its cheese products “embalmed cheese”—but the government settled on “processed cheese,” according to the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Cheese of the World.
Ingredients: Whey, cheddar cheese (milk, cheese culture, salt, enzymes), canola oil, milk protein concentrate, whey protein concentrate, milk, contains less than 2% of sodium citrate, sodium phosphate, salt, calcium phosphate, lactic acid, sodium alginate, autolyzed yeast extract, sorbic acid as a preservative, cheese culture, enzymes, apocarotenal (color), annatto (color)
Mayonnaise that’s not mayonnaise
Less of an impostor than a consumer mistake: This white spread doesn’t technically meet the official definition of “mayonnaise,” which requires at least 65% vegetable oil. What do you get instead? “Dressing,” where the major players are water, soybean oil, and vinegar. Tasty? Sure. Mayo? No.
Ingredients: Water, soybean oil, vinegar, high fructose corn syrup, modified cornstarch, sugar, eggs, salt, natural flavor, mustard flour, potassium sorbate as a preservative, paprika, spice, dried garlic.
Vanilla that’s not vanilla
There’s actually no vanilla (nothing than even starts with the prefix van-) on the ingredient list of Nilla Wafers. The only tribute to their namesake? “Natural and artificial flavor,” from what? The label doesn’t tell us.
Ingredients: Unbleached enriched flour (wheat flour, niacin, reduced iron, thiamine mononitrate (vitamin B1), riboflavin (vitamin B2), folic acid), sugar, soybean oil, high fructose corn syrup, partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil, whey (from milk), eggs, natural and artificial flavor, salt, leavening (baking soda, and/or calcium, phosphate), emulsifiers (mono- and diglycerides, soy lecithin).
Click here to read the rest of the 19 foods that aren’t Foods
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