At a poolside
lunch with friends last summer, my wife served a popular brand of “real
vegetable chips” as a side dish. Later, as I helped return the uneaten chips to the
bag, out of curiosity…I looked at the nutrition label.
A one ounce
serving contains 16 grams of carbs, including 3 of fiber and 2 of sugar, with 0
grams of “added sugar.” It also contains 1 gram of protein and 9 grams of fat,
of which 0.5 grams are saturated.
What the label
doesn’t tell you (because they don’t have to) is that the remaining 11
grams of carbohydrates are starches (long chain glucose molecules) from
“diverse root vegetables” that have
been milled and are easily digested. The 2 grams of sugars inherent in the
tuberous ingredients are combinations of monosaccharides (100% glucose) and
disaccharides (50% glucose/50% fructose). So, the unnamed carbs from the
starches (100% glucose) will raise your blood sugar faster and higher than the 2 grams of simple sugars.
The label also
doesn’t tell you (because they don’t have to) that the other fats in this
manufactured “food” product are all unsaturated
fats, the vast majority of them polyunsaturated
(PUFAs). The actual percentage is not determinable because the label says the
product includes, “expeller expressed Canola oil and/or safflower oil and/or
sunflower oil.” So, who knows what percentage of which oil was used, or if it
was all just one of them?
Of course,
“expeller expressed” canola oil is listed first because that would be the best
of the worst. “Expeller expressed” means it is less processed and refined. And of the three “seed” oils,
Canola oil has the highest percentage of the good monounsaturated fats. But the other “and/or” seed oils are not “expeller expressed.” Just “processed.”
Rounding out
the ingredients list, after tubers, PUFAs and sea salt is “beet juice
concentrate (color).” Note: the word “color” is within the quotes lest you should
think they added “beet juice concentrate” as a sweetener. But just in case you
weren’t aware of it, the USDA reports that beet sugar
production is almost 50% greater than cane sugar production in
the U. S., and sugar beets for food
use is 1½ times greater than sugar cane for food use. Do you think the
beet sugar juice in these chips is
used just for color, as they say? I don’t. But the USDA allows the label to say
this.
It’s just
another deception, but I’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s admit the
consumer is a willing dolt. We are prepared to be snookered by clever
marketing to assuage the guilt we feel for eating something that we know in our
hearts (pardon the double entendre) is bad for us. These days, the bogey man is
“added sugar,” so labels now have the new subcategory “added sugar.” This has
recently been added to the requirement that it specify “saturated fat,” but not polyunsaturated fat, or refined
starches, arguably much, much worse for our health.
But here’s the
contradiction and irony: “Vegetable chips” are a manufactured “food” product.
They are not a whole, unprocessed food with inherent sugars, such as the “taro,
sweet potato, batata, yuca or parsnip” from which they are made. There is no
Nutrition label on taro, sweet potato, batata, yucca or parsnip. So, I could
understand how you could claim that there were no “added sugars” in these whole
foods, although we’d have to ignore the successful efforts of agronomists to
hybridize fruits and vegetables to make them sweeter. But that’s not the case
here. These “vegetable chips” are heavily processed in manufacture and the beet
juice is added (for color, of course).
So what have
we got here: You take a natural whole food, mill it, process it and refine it,
then add a sweetener camouflaged as an additive for color, then cook it in
highly processed, inflammatory, oxidized and unnatural fat and you get a
snack food with a nutritional halo: “real vegetable chips.” Good
marketing, for sure..
I’m sure the USDA rule that allows a snack
“food” manufactured from processed and refined tubers (starchy root vegetables), combined with unhealthy, polyunsaturated seed oils, and sugar juice concentrate to create a
product that has by definition, no “added sugar,” is a common practice. But
then, I don’t think adding the sub-category “added sugar” has any meaning or
value, except to delude us and help the consumer (and the lobbyists and
politicians who made the law) feel good. So, just, eat your
“vegetables” and forget it.
No comments:
Post a Comment