Friday, April 13, 2012

Pre-Packaged Foods: Be Careful What You're Getting

By Graeme Dinnen


Our lifestyle has a contributory effect on our health. Having less sleep than our bodies need, coupled with the stresses and strains of tewnty-first century living, it is very likely that the internal state of the body will be far from healthy.

Deteriorating teeth are also an indication of deteriorating health within the body. In spite of all this the real cause of poor gum conditions and tooth decay is the poor-quality of packaged foods and the sugars/synthetic sweeteners and the chemicals that make them up. These simply don't impart any benefit to the body. Although sugars have without doubt become part of our 21st century way of life there are so many better choices to sugar substitutes.

'Superstore' Food:

It's worth keeping a regular check on the ingredients of pre-packaged and processed foods. Supermarkets display masses of packaged food products that are undoubtedly part of the nation's health problem. Ready-made foods have a few things in common:

- Low nutritional value

- High in unhealthy trans fats and sugars

- Loaded in additives

......some only designed to appeal to our kids.

Shops have become experts at product placement because of the inducement revenues they receive for this. Conveniently placed at eye level or close to the checkout counters for last-minute impulse buying, ready meals often contain:

- Industrially-recovered meats including connective tissue

- The last scraps of protein and offal left on a carcass following slaughter.

A common pudding targeted at schoolchildren may contain 'approved ' additives such as colourings, gelling agents and emulsifiers as well as citrate, sodium and phosphate additives. Who on earth even thought of allowing them? If you're not familiar with what these ingredients are or even what purpose they might usefully serve it doesn't really matter. It's enough to know that there is no need for them to be in the food that we or our children eat.

Whatever happened to real food?

Fast foods command premium positioning and are aggressively marketed because the more processes involved with the production of food, the greater the margin of profitability. If shops sold only fresh local goods their profits would be much lower, but we'd all be a lot healthier. Unfortunately we are well aware how corporate interests impact our well-being.....unless we consciously stop buying their unhealthy foods. ALWAYS READ THE LABELS.

Junk food is fun and convenient to eat now and then but longer term, the debatable ingredients will make the producers of pre-processed food have much to answer for. Time for a clean out




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