Tuesday, April 28, 2009

"All Natural Foods"

Read full article at:

http://www.naturalnews.com/021936.html

Factory food manufacturers have figured out that slapping an "all natural" claim onto their processed, chemically-altered food products results in increased sales. Consumers, it seems, are trying to shop for healthier foods, and they're easily fooled by "all natural" claims, even though the vast majority of food products sporting such claims are anything but natural.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) does not regulate claims of "all natural." They might claim to, but in reality, they don't. Food companies can get away with using all sorts of non-natural processes and chemical ingredients in a food product that they claim is all natural. For example, foods fried at high temperatures, resulting in the formation of cancer-causing acrylamides, are routinely labeled "all natural" in the snack section of the grocery store. And yet frying starches at high temperatures isn't natural at all -- it's a human-invented process for making boring foods like potatoes taste interesting by loading them up with fat and salt.

The salt used in such foods isn't natural either. It's almost entirely processed salt, and even the products that claim to be made from "sea salt" are actually using a white, processed sea salt (not a full-spectrum brown or pink salt like you might find with Celtic Sea Salt, which is truly natural).

Grocery product makers are also adding various chemical additives to their "all natural" products, hiding them under innocent-sounding ingredients that don't raise red flags with consumers. Monosodium glutamate (MSG), for example, is a neurotoxic substance classified as an excitotoxin. Consuming it causes migraine headaches, endocrine system damage, loss of appetite regulation (leading to obesity), neurological damage in fetuses (when consumed by expectant mothers) and many other problems. This is well known throughout the industry. Baby food manufacturers, for example, voluntarily removed MSG from their products decades ago following a public outcry about the dangers of MSG to babies and infants.

And yet today, numerous "all natural" food companies continue to use hidden forms of MSG in their foods, hiding them under innocent-sounding ingredients like yeast extract, autolyzed or hydrolyzed proteins (all of which contain MSG). Even the companies you've grown to trust in the "natural" food business are engaged in the blatant hiding of MSG in their products. Pay special attention to vegetarian food products such as veggie burgers. Read the ingredients on everything you buy and you'll find that the largest "natural" food manufacturers still use hidden MSG.

(The newest ingredient to hide MSG under is called torula yeast. Watch for it on labels.)

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