TO YOUR HEALTH
What to watch out for in those lists of ingredients
Labels and Lies
When Vani Hari was 22 years old, she was a candy addict, drank soda and ate processed and fast foods in favor of whole foods and vegetables—until her body gave up on her. She landed in a hospital bed weak and fragile.
At that moment she decided to make health her number-one priority. She used her newfound inspiration for living a healthy life to investigate what is really in the food we eat, how it’s grown and what chemicals are used in its production.
“Changing my diet to an organic wholefoods diet has changed my life,” she says. “All the issues I had as a child—asthma, eczema, allergies—went away. I was on several prescription drugs, and I’m on zero today. My weight normalized, and I actually lost another five pounds (on top of the other 30-plus pounds I had gained!). I began to have more energy than I had when I was years younger.” She found that reading nutrition labels is one of the most important aspects of buying healthy foods.
“I read ingredient labels closely,” she says. “It’s the best way to know what’s truly in a packaged food and whether it’s good for you.”
Her research and continuous efforts to find out what really is in our food led to her first New York Times best seller, The Food
Babe Way, in which she sets out to expose a lot of misinformation that’s being sold to Americans.
Hari points out that it is especially important to pay attention to the additives a product may contain. There are several, in fact, according to Mark Hyman, the New York Times best-selling author of Food: What
the Heck Should I Eat? He identifies 3,000 food additives in the U.S. food supply, many of which have not been tested for safety, and he estimates the average American consumes three to five pounds of these chemicals a year. Hari adds that there’s an assumption that everything on supermarket shelves is safe. “Unfortunately, that’s not the case,” she says, explaining that “while there are some food additives the FDA [Food and Drug Administration] has approved before they hit the shelves, this has proven to be a burdensome process. The FDA claims that so as not to waste government resources, they would just let the manufacturer decide whether an ingredient is safe to eat or not. Even the FDA’s former deputy
Knowing what’s in your food is crucial to making sure you hold your health in your own hands and don’t consume “hidden” additives.
commissioner once confessed to the
Washington Post: ‘We simply do not have the information to vouch for the safety of many of these chemicals … we do have questions about whether we can do what people expect of us.’”
In addition, recent regulations published by the U.S. Department of Agriculture set a high five percent threshold for unintended presence of genetically engineered (GE) and genetically modified organism (GMO) ingredients in processed foods, which is much higher than the 0.9 percent European Union standard.
Hari’s mission is to tell people the truth about the food they are eating. In her new book, Feeding You Lies, she writes how some big companies have changed their food ingredients and become more transparent following her efforts and, often, petitions.
“Subway restaurants agreed to remove the ‘yoga mat chemical’ from their bread following a petition I started,” she says, adding that Kraft decided to remove artificial food dyes from their kids’ mac and cheese products after she stormed their headquarters with more than 200,000 petitions.
Knowing what’s in your food is crucial to making sure you hold your health in your own hands and don’t consume “hidden” additives.
Hari says that marketing terms on the front of packages such as natural, diet, and heart healthy are very persuasive. “Food companies know this and use it to their advantage,” she says. “They are banking on you not bothering to read the ingredients to see what is really in the product.” Klaudia Balogh is a health and fitness writer for TOTI Media.