InGreedients – The Choice is Yours!
Produced by J. Thomas Wenzel III
Sir Rebel Films
When the average pedestrian on the street is asked what hydrogenated oil is, the answer could be anything from something that comes out of McDonald’s and is used in cars, to a preservative. The most popular answer is “I don’t know.” Those answers are both amusing and disturbing. Fortunately this video includes Doctors Mary Enig and Beverly Teeter to set everybody straight on the science of trans fats.
InGreedients provides a good mix of humor and revelation—revelation about the human cost of toxic food ingredients. In an average year, 42,000 will die in car accidents, 1000 in plane crashes, 17,000 will be murdered, and 32,000 will commit suicide. Those numbers look relatively minor compared to the number of deaths due to corrupted food. Cancer claims 560,000 lives per year and heart disease 870,000.
According to government new math, up to half a gram “per serving” can equal zero trans fat on the label. I seem to remember the USDA, one of many government bureaucracies, saying that the only safe level of trans fat is zero. I’m pretty sure when they said zero they meant zero, not half a gram. We live in a world of contradictions. How do they get away with this? They make the serving sizes extremely small.
We get a nice tour of Dr. Teeter’s lab as she analyzes several food-like products that claim to have zero trans fat. They all contained trans fat. Promise margarine had the most, with 0.46 grams per “serving.” Even Dr. Teeter manages to slip a touch of humor in with her serious science when she notes that it is inappropriate to assign moral characteristics like good and bad to inanimate substances like cholesterol.
Anyone who has any education on the subject knows that things like trans fat, aspartame and MSG are trouble. So why does the food industry insist on inserting ingredients that they know are toxic into their products? I don’t want to give away the ending but there is a clue in the title. THUMBS UP.
This article appeared in Wise Traditions in Food, Farming and the Healing Arts, the quarterly magazine of the Weston A. Price Foundation, Winter 2009.
🖨️ Print post
Hi Tim, I’m a WAP Chapter leader and a regular reader of your journal. A friend of mine is about to launch a hummus buinsess on a relatively large scale and is wondering what is the best option for the “cleanest” food preservative? Is there such a thing?