Have you ever wondered why Coca Cola has 2 diet colas that are almost identical out on the market?

The answer is market segmentation.

Ever since Diet Coke was introduced in 1984, it has been a girl brand, creating a strong sense of identity for women trying to stay thin. But what about the guys? Realizing that men want to drink sugar free cola as well, The Coca Cola Company introduce Coke Zero in 2006. Since it had to taste different than it’s sister brand, the chemical wizards at Coca Cola company tinkered around with the formula to come up with a slightly different product.

Here’s what they did…

What you need to know:

There you have it. The guys get poisoned by 2 artificial sweeteners, not just one that the ladies ingest.

Acesulfame Potassium is often used in conjunction with aspartame to deliver a slightly more sugary flavor compared to aspartame alone. Both are suspected carcinogens, with Acesulfame K having more negative studies attributed to it than any other artificial sweetener that is still legal to use. (In the past we were assured that cyclamate was safe too!)

Here are the ingredient lists of the two products side by side

What to do at the supermarket:

Ideally, you’ll switch to water. If not, carbonated water. If not, watered down juice. If not … some form of carbonated beverage without all these chemicals.

If you are giving your kids a Coke, better a coke with calories from sugar than aspartame and acesulfame potassium. Just do it rarely as a treat, not as a daily hydration solution.

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Clementines, if you are not familiar with them, are type of orange. They are slightly smaller, seedless, easy to peel, and very sweet. You can find them in supermarkets produce section, usually in netted bags such as above.

Being the label readers that we are, the following information from the back of the package caught our eye:

Coated with food grade vegetable, beeswax and/or

lac based wax or resin to maintain freshness.  May be

treated with one or more of the following: thiabendazole,

orthophenyl phenol and/or imazalil

What are all these funny sounding chemicals doing on fruit you may ask?

What you need to know:

This bag of clementines made it all the way from Chile to America. That’s quite a journey for citrus fruit, who are susceptible to a variety of molds. That’s why they are lightly waxed and treated with antifungal chemicals.

thiabendazole – a fungicide used in the wax covering fruit. In high doses it may cause nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, diarrhea, dizziness, drowsiness, or headaches, but since we don’t eat orange peels, there should be no problem.

orthophenyl phenol (E231)) – this is another fungicide applied post harvest to citrus fruits. It may cause a burning sensation in the eyes upon contact, but is considered safe.

imazalil – another fungicide, considered safe.

Why would citrus fruit need so much protection? Well, these babies come a long way to our supermarkets. All the way from Chile in South America. Keeping mold away is a big challenge and that’s where all these fungicides come into play.

What to do at the supermarket:

If you buy your fruit in season, there is a much lower need to spray them with fungicides.

In any case, it is a good idea to wash your oranges and citrus fruit before peeling. Wash extra careful if you plan to use the zest or make candy out of the peel.

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Pudding.

Yum.

Everyone loves pudding. You can make it at home from scratch. You can buy a powder mix and prepare at home more easily. Or you can buy a ready-made pudding.

SnackPack is one example of a ready-made pudding. From their website:

Now you can pack the fun into your child’s lunch, without the guilt. Snack Pack offers more than 20 flavors that contains no preservatives or high fructose corn syrup, and are made with real, non-fat milk.

Sounds cool!

Let’s see what the nutrition label and ingredient label say. Just to make sure. OK?

What you need to know:

Unfortunately, Snack Pack’s website offers the talk, but does not walk the walk. Nutrition information is available for some of its products, but no product has an ingredient list available online.

Here is the ingredient list (thanks to Tamar, a fooducate community member, for sending them over to us):

Nonfat Milk, Water, Sugar, Modified Corn Starch, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, less than 2% of: Cocoa (Processed with Alkali), Salt, Calcium Carbonate, Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, Natural and Artificial Flavors, Yellow 5, Yellow 6.

WTF? Pardon our French, but how in the world can this company tell parents not to feel guilty when their products use trans fat and artificial dyes?

And what’s this “made with real milk” talk, when the #2 ingredient is water !?! Yep, the product uses real milk, but it uses lots of water as well (to save money?), thickens it using the corn starch, and binds it with the milk and other ingredients using Sodium Stearoyl Lactylate, an emulsifier.

What to do at the supermarket:

No reason for a snack to contain trans-fats or artificial dyes. Read the ingredient list and choose something real.

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Who doesn’t love mashed potatoes? The smooth and creamy texture of hot potatoes mixed with salt and some butter. Unfortunately, this sidedish requires some preparation, and many people have resorted to industrial solutions.

Here is an example of a relatively new product from Betty Crocker, “Loaded Mashed” promising:

100% mashed potatoes. Seasoned with naturally flavored bacon, cheese, chives and sour cream.

Sounds nice, until we took a look at the ingredient list… Read more…

The documentary Fat, Sick & Nearly Dead is scheduled to debut on April 1st. No Joke.

It chronicles the story two men who struggle to lose weight, overcome the same rare disease and change their lives for good.  The uplifting story follows Joe Cross on a cross country road trip where he vows to do a juice fast for 60 days (Not too sure this is the best way to lose weight healthfully).  On his weight loss journey, Joe meets and inspires Phil Staples – a 420 lb truck driver from Iowa – to do the same.

According to the movie’s PR people – “The documentary is a story about hope, wellness, friendship and our ability to change.”

Seeing how other, seemingly regular, people are able to overcome difficulties is always inspiring. Let’s hope a few more lives will culinarily change for the better after watching the movie.

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Kellogg’s is copying a page from General Mills’ Fiber One playbook, and is offering a fiber rich cereal line for our healthy dining pleasure. And they’ve one-upped their competitor by adding those magical purchase-inducing antioxidants into the mix.

Hoping to create a cereal that is more tasty and visually appealing than Fiber One, Fiber Plus comes with colorful yogurt and fruit clusters.

Boasting 40% of the daily fiber, this sounds like a great start to your morning, not to mention the yogurt, the berries, and the antioxidants.

We took a look at the label…

What you need to know:

In addition to the fiber, you get 12 grams of sugars, which is the equivalent of three teaspoons worth.

The sodium count is quite high too – 200mg is 9% of the daily max, and certainly not something you’d expect to find in a sweet morning cereal.

A 1 cup serving is almost 2 ounces by weight, which is twice the amount of food compared to puffed cereals.  That also explains the relatively high calorie count – 170 vs an average of 120 for other cereals.

But the real story of this cereal lies in the ingredient list. You can tell it ain’t pretty just by its length:

WHOLE GRAIN WHEAT, SUGAR, RICE, CHICORY ROOT FIBER, MIXED BERRY FLAVORED CLUSTERS (ROLLED OATS, SUGAR, OAT FIBER, CORN BRAN, CORN SYRUP, WHEAT STARCH, HONEY, YELLOW CORN FLOUR, CORN CEREAL, CANOLA OIL, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS, FRUCTOOLIGOSACCHARIDES, MODIFIED CORN STARCH, SOYBEAN OIL, SALT, CARAMEL COLOR, MALT EXTRACT, STRAWBERRY POWDER, CITRIC ACID, GLYCERIN, BHT [PRESERVATIVE], RED #40, BLUE #2, CELLULOSE GUM, GREEN #3, BLUE #1, RED #40 LAKE, BLUE #2 LAKE), MODIFIED WHEAT STARCH, SOLUBLE CORN FIBER, MALT FLAVORING, SALT, ROLLED OATS, FRACTIONATED PALM KERNEL OIL, INULIN, OAT FIBER, NONFAT DRY MILK, CORN BRAN, MODIFIED CORN STARCH, GLYCERIN, WHEAT STARCH, CORN SYRUP, HONEY, APPLE PUREE CONCENTRATE, YELLOW CORN FLOUR, STRAWBERRIES, BLUEBERRIES, VITAMIN A PALMITATE, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVORS, KIWI JUICE CONCENTRATE, WHEY, MONOGLYCERIDES, SOY LECITHIN, CORN STARCH, NONFAT YOGURT POWDER (HEAT TREATED AFTER CULTURING), CANOLA OIL, INVERT SUGAR, STRAWBERRY JUICE CONCENTRATE, ASCORBIC ACID (VITAMIN C), CINNAMON, FRUCTOOLIGOSACCHARIDES, RED RASPBERRY JUICE CONCENTRATE, GUAR GUM, BLUEBERRY JUICE CONCENTRATE, NIACINAMIDE, MALT EXTRACT, CARAMEL COLOR, CITRIC ACID, VITAMIN D, ALPHA TOCOPHEROL ACETATE (VITAMIN E), BHT (PRESERVATIVE), PYRIDOXINE HYDROCHLORIDE (VITAMIN B6), RIBOFLAVIN (VITAMIN B2), THIAMIN HYDROCHLORIDE (VITAMIN B1), BETA CAROTENE (SOURCE OF VITAMIN A), FOLIC ACID, VITAMIN B12.

We lost count after 70 ingredients. For your viewing convenience, we’ve marked all the sources of sweet in BOLD, and all the sources of fiber as underlined. Note how many different ways they’ve come up with to push fiber into this product. You’d never consume this much fiber from a plain whole food.

The FRUCTOOLIGOSACCHARIDES are both fiber and sweetener at the same time. A darling of the food industry since the 1980′s, this ingredient is sourced naturally from chicory roots, banana, onions, leeks, and other veggies. It’s only 30-50% as sweet as sugar, but hey, it’s got fiber!

Let’s move on. The cereal contains additional “goodies”.  For example, the entire lineup of artificial colors approved by the FDA, but sadly shown to cause neurological problems in kids. In Europe they’re phasing ‘em out. Here? Dream on.

Another swell ingredient: FRACTIONATED PALM KERNEL OIL. Palm kernel oil is VERY high in saturated fat; fractionating it makes it even more saturated. This means the melting point is higher, meaning solid at room temperature, meaning this is what creates the cutesy little yogurt clusters in the cereal (the oil is mixed with the “non-fat yogurt powder” hiding somewhere in the ingredient list).

BHT, used here as a preservative, is also a suspected carcinogen.

Yes, there are strawberries and blueberries thrown in here, at amounts barely worth mentioning. It’s not that they contribute to the flavor at all. For that we’ve got loads of artificial and natural flavors in the list.

What about antioxidants, you may ask. After all, they are a part of the product name. According to Kellogg’s, the cereal offers antioxidant vitamins C and E.

Sure it does, as added ingredients, not naturally occurring in the fruit clusters, heaven forbid. Lame. Very lame.

This product is a feat of food engineering, so kudos to Kellogg’s scientists. But at what price? Why such a long list of ingredients, many of which are superfluous?

And why do we need to get so much fiber concentrated into one bowl of breakfast cereal? When we consume foods that naturally contain a certain amount of fiber, they leave us fuller than when fiber is tacked on like sticky notes to frenzied secretary’s computer screen. With this cereal, there’s a higher chance we’ll consume too much fiber too fast, especially since many people eat more than the recommended single serving size.

Note: there’s a warning on the package for “New users” – Increase your fiber intake gradually. Gastrointestinal discomfort may occur until your body adjusts.

One parting thought from the world of computers. Microsoft is well known for its feature bloat – just think of all the functions in WORD or EXCEL that you’ve never used, or tried to and got so flabbergasted as the software crashed. Now compare to the simplicity of Apple’s products, such as the iPhone, with only one button. Simplicity is so much better for the user. But it is so much harder to remove features, to focus on just the right ones, than it is to lazily leave them all in.

As a challenge to Kellogg’s, how about a cereal that will tantalize consumers, delight dietitians, fascinate Fooducate, and contain only 3 ingredients?

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Wish-Bone salad dressing is upping the ante with an ad campaign and a new label on the bottles. The label includes the following bold statement:

Naturally helps
BETTER ABSORB vitamins A & E
from salad with the oils in Wish-Bone

Wow, that sounds great. Absorb more vitamins, from the oils in Wish-Bone, how did they manage that? What kind of special oil does Wish-Bone use? What a scientific breakthrough!! How come we didn’t hear anything about this in the news?

Folks, sorry to be the party pooper – no news here. All and any fats help the body more readily absorb certain vitamins. Wish-Bone is not special in any which way, aside from a creative marketing department. Vitamins A,D,E, and K are known as fat soluble (vs. water soluble B vitamins). This means that consuming foods rich in these vitamins, together with a small amount of fat, can help more be absorbed by our body.

That’s why it makes sense, aside from the flavor added, to have some oil in your salad, or to have some source of fat in whatever main dish you are having. Even the small amounts of fat from a serving of chicken or lean beef should suffice.

But if you do go ahead and purchase Wish-Bone salad dressing here’s what else you’ll get – lots of unnecessary and some potentially harmful ingredients. From Robusto Italiano’s ingredient label:

Water, Soybean and Canola Oils, Distilled Vinegar, Sugar, Salt, Garlic (Dehydrated), Onion (Dehydrated), Red Bell Peppers (Dehydrated), Maltodextrin (Corn), Spices, Xanthan Gum, Autolyzed Yeast Extract, Natural Flavor, Lemon Juice Concentrate, Calcium Disodium EDTA (Used to Protect Quality), Caramel Color, Annatto Extract (Color)

Just for fun, let’s imagine the marketing messages Wish-Bone could come up with for these prime ingredients:

made with  Water
to help drive manufacturing cost down
and Wish-Bone revenue Up!

or

made with  Soybean Oil
because olive oil is too expensive
even if that’s the true Italian recipe

or

Sugar and salt
in amounts you wouldn’t dare add at home!

or

made with stuff from laboratories
like Maltodextrin, Xanthan Gum, Autolyzed Yeast Extract

or

Now with Calcium Disodium EDTA*
On the FDA priority list to be studied for mutagenic & reproductive effects!
*May cause intestinal upsets, muscle cramps, kidney damage, and blood in urine.

You get the drift. Salad dressing is a huge business where there probably shouldn’t be one, not if this is the stuff that’s pushed to consumers.

Our friend Jennifer Huget at the Washington Post looks at the bright side – if using a favorite dressing encourages you to eat more vegetables, that’s a good thing.

What to do at the supermarket:

How about making you own Italian Dressing – it’s really  easy! Mix olive oil with some lemon juice, add a sprinkle of salt and pepper and presto – you’re ready. Invest in a good olive oil and some lemons, not a bottle of chemicals.

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Once upon a time there was “Cheerios”. For almost 40 years, up until the late 1970′s, consumers had only one Cheerios flavor to choose from. And then General Mills, corporate owner of the Cheerios brand, introduced Honey Nut Cheerios. It was an instant success. Sweeter (mostly due to sugar, not honey) than it’s elder sibling, it quickly conquered the hearts and taste buds of children across America. In the next decade, the two Cheerios brands were served in hundreds of millions of breakfasts across the nation.

But as competition grew, and the need to grow profit too, GM had to continuously innovate to stay ahead. And thus, in the past 15 years, we have seen no less than 15 variations on the “O” theme including Multigrain, Berry Burst, Yogurt Burst, and now Chocolate Cheerios.

Unfortunately, none of the innovations over the years produced a healthier or more nutritious product. Usually a new product meant more sugar added, less fiber, and in some cases additives such as artificial food colorings. But the health claims kept getting better, usually in inverse proportion to the true nutritional value of the product.

So as General Mills has grown, so have our waistlines. We’re not picking specifically on this manufacturer. The phenomena is not limited to GM or just the cereal category. It is the story of the food industry as a whole. Cut throat competition and quarterly earning reports mandate “growth! growth! growth!” in sales.

But on the demand side, there’s only so many calories people can consume in a day. Or maybe this is the reason we’re packing on the pounds?

Anyway, we got a bit carried away. Let’s get back to CC (Chocolate Cheerios) and see how this new product stacks up nutritionally.

What you need to know:

The nutrition facts panel tells an interesting story. At 100 calories per serving (before adding milk), CC is on the lower end of the breakfast cereal calorie count. Nice. But as with most cereals, the 3/4 of a cup serving size does not represent what most people truly consume.

Despite the prominent “whole grain guarantee” by manufacturer General Mills, there is only 1 gram of fiber per serving in here. What a let down. Honey Nut Cheerios has 2 grams of fiber. Not to mention regular Cheerios with 3 grams.

Sugarwise, we’re talking about 9 grams or just over 2 teaspoons per serving. That’s not as high as Cocoa Puffs, but it’s nine times more sugar than in regular Cheerios.

Here is the ingredient list:

Whole Grain Corn, Sugar, Corn Meal, Corn Syrup, Whole Grain Oats, Canola and/or Rice Bran Oil, Cocoa Processed with Alkali, Color Added, Salt, Dried Corn Syrup, Corn Bran, Barley Malt Extract, Trisodium Phosphate, Vanillin, Vitamin E (Mixed Tocopherols) and BHT Added to Preserve Freshness. Vitamins and Minerals: Calcium Carbonate, Vitamin C (Sodium Ascorbate), Zinc and Iron (Mineral Nutrients), a B Vitamin (Niacinamide), Vitamin B6 (Pyridoxine Hydrochloride), Vitamin B2 (Riboflavin), Vitamin B1 (Thiamin Mononitrate), Vitamin A (Palmitate), a B Vitamin (Folic Acid), Vitamin B12, Vitamin D3.

Yes it’s made with whole grain corn, but also with corn meal. Notice that sugar is the number 2 ingredient. There are four appearances of sugar synonyms in the product.  The Cocoa Processed with Alkali – Also known as Dutch Processed Cocoa – helps to remove the natural acidity of the cocoa bean. Unfortunately, it also removes the beneficial flavanoids found in the cocoa beans. BHT (E321) is a controversial additive that keeps a product fresh for longer, but at the potential price of hyperactive kids or cancer.

The most maddening aspect of Chocolate Cheerios though is not what we have discussed so far, but rather the bold health claim that appears inside the red heart:

May Reduce the Risk of Heart Disease

You can’t miss it on the box. This claim is qualified in tiny print at the bottom of the box:

Diets low in saturated fat and cholesterol may reduce the risk of heart disease. Chocolate Cheerios is low in fat, saturated fat free, and naturally cholesterol free.

This is such BULL. Of course this product is cholesterol free, it’s not made from any animal products. And obviously a breakfast cereal is not going to be high in fats – it’s a C E R E A L for heaven’s sake. How will all the added sugars help the heart?

As for the logic FAIL. It’s the same as saying diets low in salt are heart healthy; candy is low in salt; pig out!!!

Bottom line: Chocolate Cheerios may be a tasty treat, but not a mainstay nutritious breakfast cereal.

What to do at the supermarket:

If you’re going to buy a Cheerios product, your top choice should be the original. Number 2 should be the multigrain followed by Honey Nut. Leave Chocolate Cheerios product be.

Want to learn more? Download our free ebook with the top 10 tips for choosing healthy cereal.

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The healthy snackbar segment is huge and growing. It seems that manufacturers have figured out a way to dress up candy bars as healthy, and fill our craving for an anytime, anywhere treat. To be fair, there are many decent products out there, but some are not much more than glorified Snickers or Twix bars.

Let’s take a look at Kellogg’s Fiber Plus Dark Chocolate Almond Bar, which boasts 35% of the daily value of fiber and, as a comparison, Larabar’s Chocolate Coconut bar.

What you need to know:

We’ll begin by comparing some nutrients. The Fiber plus bar is rather small (36 grams) and  contains 130 calories. The Larabar is 40% bigger at 51 grams and has 84% more calories – 240.

On the fiber front, Kellogg’s wins hands down with 9 grams vs Larabar’s 5 grams. And sugar-wise it contains only 7 grams, vs 22 grams. That’s 2 teaspoons of sugar vs 5 and a half. Larabar does have 5 grams of protein vs only 2 grams for Kellogg’s.

So far it seems like Kellogg’s has the upper hand – less calories, less sugar, much more fiber. Just what the doctor ordered. Right?

Not so fast. Let’s have a peek under the hood shall we?

Here’s the ingredient list for fiber plus:

CHICORY ROOT FIBER, ROLLED OATS, CRISP RICE (RICE FLOUR, SUGAR, MALT EXTRACT, SALT, MIXED TOCOPHEROLS FOR FRESHNESS), SUGAR, ROASTED ALMONDS, INULIN FROM CHICORY ROOT, SEMISWEET CHOCOLATE DROPS (SUGAR, CHOCOLATE, COCOA BUTTER, DEXTROSE, MILK FAT, SOY LECITHIN, CONFECTIONER’S GLAZE [SHELLAC, HYDROGENATED COCONUT OIL]), VEGETABLE OIL (HYDROGENATED PALM KERNEL, COCONUT AND PALM OIL), FRUCTOSE, CANOLA OIL, CONTAINS TWO PERCENT OR LESS OF HONEY, CHOCOLATE, COCOA (PROCESSED WITH ALKALI), GLYCERIN, TRICALCIUM PHOSPHATE, WHEY, SALT, BAKING SODA, SOY LECITHIN, NATURAL AND ARTIFICIAL FLAVOR, SORBITAN MONOSTEARATE, POLYSORBATE 60, VITAMIN E ACETATE, GUM ARABIC, ZINC OXIDE, NONFAT DRY MILK, WHOLE WHEAT FLOUR, PARTIALLY DEFATTED PEANUT FLOUR, SOY PROTEIN ISOLATE, BHT (FOR FRESHNESS), XANTHAN GUM.

and for Larabar:

Dates, Almonds, Walnuts, Unsweetened Cocoa Powder, Unsweetened Coconut.

A whopping 54 Kellogg’s ingredients vs. 5 for Larabar. Even before reading through the ingredient list, one must ask herself, why does a bar need so many things inside?  Compare to 5 human readable ingredients from Larabar.

Here’s what happened with Kellogg’s: When your first and foremost ingredient is chicory root fiber, not a “food” people consume regularly, you have to make up for it with a long list of other stuff to make the product taste good. Four mentions of sugars, shellac (a bug extract), glycerin, soy lecithin, artificial flavors, natural flavors, BHT, polysorbates – who really needs all these? What about simple real food? Can’t Kellogg’s take a page from Larabar’s book?

Larabar’s ingredients help explain it’s high sugar content – from the dates.  Its fiber comes from the dates, almonds and walnuts. No wonder the calorie count is high either – it is both a larger bar and it contains nuts with fats, albeit good ones.

Too bad Larabar doesn’t come in a mini-size, about half the current bar, then it would be the hands down winner in this match-up, both from an ingredient perspective and a caloric one.

What to do at the supermarket:

Buying bars, be on the lookout for ingredient lists the length of a Stephen King novel. They tell the story of a highly processed product manufactured to tell a certain story about certain nutrients (in this case – fiber). Watch for the sugar content and whether it is added, or simply comes from the dried fruit in the bar.

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Not all red meats are created equal. Better phrased – not all red meats affect our health equally. These are the findings published recently in Circulation, the scholarly journal of the American Heart Association.

Turns out that processed meats are far more likely to increase your chances of diabetes and heart disease, when compared to unprocessed. The study, a meta-analysis of previous research efforts, specifically bifurcated meats to 2 categories – unprocessed and processed.

Eating unprocessed beef, pork or lamb appeared not to raise risks of heart attacks and diabetes … suggesting that salt and chemical preservatives may be the real cause of these two health problems associated with eating meat.

… on average, each 1.8 oz (50 grams) daily serving of processed meat a day — one to two slices of deli meats or one hot dog — was associated with a 42 percent higher risk of heart disease and a 19 percent higher risk of developing diabetes.

“To lower risk of heart attacks and diabetes, people should consider which types of meats they are eating,” said Renata Micha of the Harvard School of Public Health. Read more…

So T-bone steak – yes. Hot dog – no. Chuck roast – yes. Bologna – no.

What you need to know:

This is a very interesting finding. Although the two groups of meat were similar in saturated fats, the ingredients that may cause the different health outcomes were the additives. The study found that processed meats contained, on average, four times more sodium and 50% more nitrate preservatives than unprocessed meats.

The American Meat Institute rejected the findings, stating that one study is not sufficient to draw conclusions.

What to do at the supermarket:

Although processed meats are very convenient, they contain many ingredients that are not good for you. Best to buy lean cuts of meat that you can prepare at home. Or consider other healthy alternatives – fish, poultry and legumes.

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