Food Fraud

[tontrin]

I read an interesting an sobering article about food fraud here today. It's a scary world out there in the food industry these days. It seems shoppers need to be more and more careful about purchases.

[Sookielee]

Ok, now that was depressing to read. Now I know for sure where I will be getting some of those items that I buy. Guess I will have to ignore the little ms frugal inside me from now on.

[tontrin]

Tell me about it!

[Lady Magical]

Oh My!!!! Thanks for the info, this is just too depressing for words isn't it.

[Regina]

Juice has been being cut with apple juice for at least twenty years now. I discovered that when reading the labels when my kids were very young. They had allergies to some fruits so I had to make sure of what I was buying. They were always labeled as such-and-such when they really weren't.

Food manufacturers are doing everything they can to make money and I find it completely disturbing the stuff they'll put into things and the chemicals our foods are treated with, like spraying some meat with ammonia to kill bacteria and preserve color. Guess what. If meat is exposed to air for a couple of days it SHOULD look brownish instead of pink because it's oxidized. It's perfectly natural and doesn't hurt the meat in any way, and oddly enough once meat is cooked it's brown anyway. It just doesn't look as appealing so it gets a nice chemical wash.

I'm a very frugal shopper but still our grocery budget often is larger than our mortgage payment. I see what I spend on groceries today as an investment into hopefully better health in the future. There are no guarantees that it actually will be but it's like paying insurance for something. The health problems caused by a poor diet will far outweigh the cost of eating as healthy of food as we can. Of course there are plenty of folks who can barely afford to put a meal on the table to begin with, and that's where a lot of those "fraud foods" end up going. Do you ever notice how all the junk food is way cheaper than real food? Like I could feed my family frozen dinners for a fraction of the cost it takes to serve a meal. I shudder to think how awful the ingredients used in those meals must be for them to be so inexpensive.

Oh, and the milk thing! That reminded me of something I've seen multiple times when I buy cream. I use a little cream in water to make hot chocolate (best hot chocolate ever) and out of all the brands I've bought there are only two that I would call cream. One of those has some thickener but it also has a higher butter fat content. The other isn't quite as thick but has the higher butter fat content. All the others have a consistency and butter fat content of half-and-half. Now this is really important stuff because it takes a lot more of the watered down stuff than it does the thick stuff to make a good cup of chocolate so in the end costs almost twice as much. If it was just a thickness thing instead of butter fat thing I'd still be able to use the same amount of a thinner cream.

[simstown]

(04-21-2012 12:43 PM)tontrin Wrote:  I read an interesting an sobering article about food fraud here today. It's a scary world out there in the food industry these days. It seems shoppers need to be more and more careful about purchases.

Whats going on with processed foods wasn't done by accident. Google: codex alimentarius (Food Law)

The goal is to Criminalizing Natural Health, and label Vitamins and Herbs which the human body needs as toxins.

Henry Kissinger Quote:

"Who controls the food supply controls the people; who controls the energy can control whole continents; who controls money can control the world."


Mr Kissinger wrote a plan called National Security Memorandum #200 which outlines the need to use food as a weapon against the people to cull the human population world wide.

Now google: The Georgia Guidestones

On one of the highest hilltops in Elbert County, Georgia stands a huge granite monument. Engraved in eight different languages on the four giant stones that support the common capstone are 10 Guides, or commandments. That monument is alternately referred to as The Georgia Guidestones, or the American Stonehenge.

The goal is to cull at least 90% of the human population according to the first line of the The Georgia Guidestones which reads:
1. Maintain humanity under 500,000,000 in perpetual balance with nature.
2. Guide reproduction wisely – improving fitness and diversity.
3. Unite humanity with a living new language.
4. Rule passion – faith – tradition – and all things with tempered reason.
5. Protect people and nations with fair laws and just courts.
6. Let all nations rule internally resolving external disputes in a world court.
7. Avoid petty laws and useless officials.
8. Balance personal rights with social duties.
9. Prize truth – beauty – love – seeking harmony with the infinite.
10.Be not a cancer on the earth – Leave room for nature – Leave room for nature.

[tontrin]

I believe it's not been done by accident; they are also taking away all the milk with fat in it from our children in the schools. Children's brains need fat in order to develop properly (this has been scientifically proven). They are trying to dumb down the people.

People actually need to eat a healthy amount of fat. Our society has been pushing a low fat/fat free diet for a long time now, a diet that makes me very ill to eat. My hair wouldn't grow and my skin dried up and was flaking, peeling and bleeding because I didn't have enough fat in my diet when I tried to eat low fat. I also had very little energy and put on weight like you wouldn't believe. A lot of the reason for that is that they put a lot of sugar in low fat foods, and sugar makes me fat. LOL :bounce:

There was a news story not long ago about a woman that sent her child to kindergarten with a sack lunch she'd made at home and a Federal Government official came into the school, inspected the child's lunch and took it away, saying it wasn't properly balanced, and said the child had to eat the school lunch. I don't know about you all, but I remember school lunches and they were never as good or nutritious as home cooked meals. May daughter eats the school lunch, and sometimes she says it isn't fit for human consumption. I think the government needs to step out of our food.

[Ghost]

I wonder if the government official who took away the kid's lunch ever looked in the trash can to see how balanced the part of the school lunch that the kids actually ate was? You can put a soggy green bean casserole in front of a kid, but you aren't going to get them to eat it!

[tontrin]

Too true, Ghost, too true.

[Jaguwar]

(04-28-2012 10:00 PM)tontrin Wrote:  There was a news story not long ago about a woman that sent her child to kindergarten with a sack lunch she'd made at home and a Federal Government official came into the school, inspected the child's lunch and took it away, saying it wasn't properly balanced, and said the child had to eat the school lunch. I don't know about you all, but I remember school lunches and they were never as good or nutritious as home cooked meals. [...]

Actually the school lunch in question was a lot less balanced, and certainly full of fats. I remember it included chicken nuggets, and I want to say there were fries too. The girl had brought a sandwich, some fruit, and a juice drink of some sort if memory serves. The point is, the homemade lunch sounded an awful lot more nutritious than the school one.

[Sookielee]

I remember reading that story. I thought if that had been my child, someones head would have been rolling.

[Regina]

That's just ridiculous. I also remember eating school lunches way back in the day and they had anything but balanced nutrition, then in high school it was even worse. They had a food line where you would go through and order things like deep-fried burritos and milkshakes. The one "healthy" option they had was a salad made mainly of iceberg lettuce (no vitamins there) and a boiled egg. While I was in high school I pretty much had to eat that but then a couple of years later when I went back to the school as an employee I almost always brought my lunch.

I've come to realize that many "nutritionists" and "dieticians" don't know their head from a hole in the ground when it comes to the nutrient value of food. Some foods are great additions to a meal in that they may help fill a person with little caloric impact but in too many of them are used to build a menu around. For example I like to use grated zucchini in stuff we bake and in soups. It has practically no vitamins so since it also has practically no calories I think it makes a good substitute for starches that would otherwise be used that also have no nutrient value. No, it doesn't thicken soup like corn starch would but it gives the soup more substance. In a cake, it adds moisture and a bit more bulk and fiber than would be there with only flour. I wouldn't, however, serve zucchini up as a vegetable unless it was mixed in with other summer squash because it has no nutrient value. Other summer squashes like patty pan and crookneck actually do have decent amounts of potassium and small amounts of some other vitamins.

Where fat is concerned I know different people have different requirements and some people do really well on a low-fat diet and others need more fat. If I eat low fat I'm starving all the time. Of course there are fats to totally avoid, if possible, like shortening and margarine but some of the natural fats have been made out for a long time to be villains when they really aren't. I've seen too much research and testing done on blood cholesterol and the types of fats a person eats to believe that the cholesterol in butter is bad for a person. When someone goes completely off of processed fats and replaces them with butter and lard, and their good cholesterol goes up to the point they no longer require medication to keep their cholesterol in check, that's a really good indication there's something haywire in what we're being told. There really wasn't much in the way of research done to convince doctors that meat cholesterol was bad for people, it really was pretty much a conclusion they came to on their own. Think of it like how centuries ago people believed that flies were created from decaying matter. We now know that decaying matter doesn't produce flies but attracts them and they lay their eggs in it.

When I was in my mid-thirties I started having problems with my gall bladder. Up to that point I pretty much ate the recommended diet, including using moderate amounts of shortening and margarine since they were not "saturated" fats. Later on I switched over to using only natural fats like lard, butter, and olive oil and all of a sudden my gall bladder problems were a thing of the past. Now all it takes is half of a flour tortilla made with shortening to put me in so much pain I can't see straight. I can eat all the natural fats I need with no problems at all.

I remember years ago going to Weight Watchers. I made it for several months and lost some weight in the process but I felt like I was starving all the time. Later I easily lost weight by eating low-carb, high-fat and never felt hungry unless I really needed to eat.

The media is full of news about a "diabetes epidemic". I just keep thinking, oh yeah, just keep painting everyone with the same wide brush and expecting everyone to be able to eat the same things. The trouble is, you put people who can't handle carbs on a low-fat diet and start pushing the carbs at them, it just sets off an endless cycle of food cravings and weight gain. Someone like me eats a half a banana and twenty minutes later is hungrier than they were before they ate the banana so they grab something else to eat. Or just give me a slice of regular fat cheese with a few orange sections or a quarter of an apple sliced and dipped in peanut butter and I can be good to go for hours.

[tontrin]

Ya, just give a person like me a half a banana, and I won't only be hungry twenty minutes later; I will have a horrible low blood sugar attack and be sick to my stomach. Yet some people eat them like they're going out of style. I had to give them up years ago because they made me so sick.