Do you know what is in your food?

Today I want to tell you about reading food labels and understanding them, so you know what you are putting in your body. With so the rise of inflammatory diseases and gut issues, it is important to look at the things we are putting in our bodies. Covering your symptoms with medications is not always the answer. Until you get to the root cause of what your body is fighting you will always have the problem.

Changing your eating habits and understanding what you are putting in your body is the first step to healing it. What is on the front of a package of food is not necessarily what is in it. WHAT? Marketing is different than what is required by law to disclose what is in our food. And this portion is also rather sketchy in itself. Lots of chemicals can be hidden under one ingredient.

Eating a whole food diet is your best option as they only have 1 ingredient. For those processed items that we do buy understanding what is in them is important. Let’s be real not all of us can or have the time to bake fresh bread or buns, or make our own noodles or crackers. You know those processed items we still eat even if it is not on a regular basis.

What are the top ingredients that I look for to impact my buying decisions?

1. Artificial flavor without specifying where it came from.

So natural flavor could be something as simple as peppermint oil or something like red coloring from crushed-up beetles. How crazy is that? We could be eating crushed-up beetles! The list of artificial ingredients is way too long to go over and the number one thing I avoid. My body does not tolerate the extra chemicals or whatever else they are putting in there. I turn red, have digestive issues, and feel the effects shortly after consuming it.

2. Gluten and Dairy free.

These two mean what they say which is that the product doesn't contain gluten or dairy. Yes gluten is inflammatory, and a lot of people's bodies don't like it but again that goes back to bio-individuality. I wanted to talk about this because it's important to check what gluten or dairy is being substituted with, so most of the time gluten is substituted with corn, potato, or soy. This is not necessarily a bad thing; it really comes back to what your body can tolerate. What you need to know here is that the plants are sprayed heavily with chemicals. Those chemicals are detrimental to our health and well-being.

What comes to mind here is “Why is gluten sensitivity/intolerance growing so rapidly when 100 years ago it was not a thing?” Is it due to all the chemicals sprayed on the crops that are to promote better yields?

When you're substituting things with corn, potato, and soy just because it isn't gluten doesn't mean that it's not sprayed with chemicals. They are being sprayed with glyphosate. wheat corn and soy are the main crops that are sprayed with glyphosate. Sneaky ingredients like corn syrup or cornstarch are derived from corn and soy. These show up in our processed foods and we don't necessarily know about the chemical aspect.

Is that why people have started to develop intolerances to them because they're in literally everything that we eat and so it's the more that you eat it repeatedly, the more your body is going to develop a reaction to it?

3. Vegan and plant-based

Vegan and plant-based products are marketed as plants. Marketing wise they make the labels look green, vegetables, grass, and healthy. When the ingredients can be chocked full of artificial ingredients, chemicals, and junk our bodies cannot tolerate them. Oil, chemical, food additive, and preservatives don't come from animal sources. They come from plants so your plant-based product can be literally all ingredients that you don't even know what they are.

Read the ingredients and find out what is replacing the dairy or the meat for example a plant-based burger might have anywhere from 10 to 20 ingredients in it versus a grass-fed beef Patty that has just one ingredient. The grass-fed beef has better traceability. Finding well-sourced plant-based meat or veggie Patty that still uses whole food ingredients. A vegan/plant-based label doesn't always mean it's made from real whole plants.

Vegan and plant-based doesn't necessarily mean that it is healthy because they contain a multitude of unknown ingredients. Some vegan and plant-based items are so awesome great ingredients but some of them have a bunch of junk on the back and the marketing and label just suck you right in.

4. Grass-fed and grass-finished beef

Grass-finished means that the cattle ate nothing but grass and forage for its entire life. Grass-fed means the cattle was started on a grass-based diet but may have been supplemented with grain at some point in its life or even finished on a full-grain diet. I did not know there was a difference between grass-fed and grass-finish. Another thing to note on grass-fed/finished, this does not guarantee that the cow is out there roaming around in the pasture all day. A cow can still be kept inside a barn never see the light of day and be hand-fed grass or hay and that counts as grass-fed. Isn’t that crazy? This was eye-opening for me regarding the buzzwords aka marketing on the front of the packages that pull you in to purchase.

For my household, we purchase all our meat from a local farm and have it processed at a local meat market. Our meat is grass-fed not grass-finished. We started this 6 years ago and will never go back to the hormone-filled junk on most grocery shelves.

5. Organic vs non-organic

When it comes to labeling organic foods there are several different tiers. The first one is 100% organic. That means that the product is made up of 100% certified organic ingredients. You'll usually see the little green USDA organic seal which indicates that the producer of those ingredients is a certified organic farmer. If it just says organic, that means no less than 95% organic. If it says made with organic ingredients that means no less than 70% organic. Anything less than 70% is not allowed to use the word organic on their label.

why do we need to have different tiers of organic labeling? The process of being able to slap that Organic label on is not an easy one. Organic farmers must go through a very long process before they can become certified organics they have to wait three years before they can start marketing their products as organic to ensure that all residue has been removed from the soil.

To be organic you must grow in/on soil that has NO synthetic substances (fertilizer and pesticides), antibiotics, or hormones. The processed foods that are not 100% organic do not necessarily have bad ingredients just ones that can not be considered organic such as enzymes in yogurt, pectin, or baking soda.

Yes, it's more expensive because it's still not really the norm. If all food was organic then we probably wouldn't be seeing this price difference. Although my cage-free pasture-raised eggs are cheaper these days than the caged ones.

This just emphasizes how broken our food system is that a farmer can spray chemicals to kill bugs, spray more chemicals to kill weeds, and then add chemicals to the soil and we don't require them to label any of that. An organic farmer that wants to go use the USDA organic label must wait three years, pay a bunch of money, and go through a long legal process to prove that they don't use any chemicals, antibiotics, hormones, synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides.

Final thoughts

Forget checking the nutrition facts the ingredient list is where you need to be looking.

Do your research be your own advocate and investigate the ingredients if you're not sure ask. Figure out what's most important to you, is it meat sourcing? is it best practice for the environment? is it reducing chemical exposure to your fresh produce? Is it avoiding certain accrued additives? Choose one thing that you want to start paying attention to on your labels and begin there.

For example, if you choose meat sourcing as the most important to you, the next time you go to the grocery store you're looking for one that says grass-fed or grass-finished.

What you buy is important it's also important to stay up to date with what's going on in the food industry from like a regulation standpoint, consumers are the ones who make legislative changes so keep buying what's important to you, educate your friends, and family on these topics, and do what you can to support groups that are trying to make lasting change.

Clean Label Project is one consumer advocacy group that does a lot of work with the FDA. They speak with them about consumer demands, and they draft propositions.

Be informed, share your findings, and help the change to clean labels!

~ Tina