Processed Food & the Twinkie.

You are what you eat -- and what you don't eat.

Many of us dont quite hit the entire food pyramid, but watch what you are eating.

Even foods claimed to be 100 percent natural and all whole grain, sometimes arent when you look at the ingredients. A good rule of thumb is that the first ingredient should not be sugar, should not be high fructose corn syrup, and contain no artificial colors or dyes.

Many ingredients in processed food are made directly from petroleum products, including natural gas or crude oil, says Ettinger in "Twinkie, Deconstructed." While eight of the ingredients in Twinkies come from domestic corn, and three from soybeans, others are derived from sources as divergent as rocks, trees and petroleum products (the latter are used to make niacin and food coloring, among other food products).

Packed into this tiny cake are 39 ingredients. flour and eggs, are expected, but cellulose gum, calcium sulfate, and Polysorbate 60? Those ingredients are also used in Sheetrock, shampoo, laundry detergent, even rocket fuel, and at least five came from rocks

The raw materials come from all over; the Far East, Africa, India, Europe, the Middle East and the United States. "You're biting into the Twinkie industrial complex. You are really biting into a worldwide network. I call it the ‘Twinkie Nexus,'" explained food writer Steve Ettlinger.

The vitamins, artificial flavors and colorings come from petroleum. Phosphates from limestone make Twinkies light and airy. Only one preservative is used. "Sorbic acid ... is made from natural gas. That really blew my mind," Ettlinger said.

As for the best part of the Twinkie, the creamy middle, Ettinger says there's no cream in the cream at all. "It's mostly Crisco. It's mostly shortening," he explained.

The makers of Twinkies issued a statement saying, "Deconstructing the Twinkie is like trying to deconstruct the universe. We think the millions of people would agree that Twinkies just taste great."

Eating a Twinkie won't hurt you, but how we make and consume processed foods may come at a cost. "It is what it is. If you want healthy, if you want something good for you, eat your broccoli," Ettlinger said.

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In Michael Pollan’s newest book "In Defense of Food" makes interesting.
He gives the simplest rules to live by and they make the smartest sense.

Like, don’t buy anything with ingredients you can’t pronounce or that your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize.

More and more people are advocating this- I hear it on the TV, read about it in magazines

I wish he could use more layman english, but the gist of it is that the value of whole foods has been sidelined by a lot of marketing jargon for processed foods.

Excerpt from the book

..common food animals rejiggered to fit nutritionist fashion, as animal scientists figured out how to breed leaner pigs and select for leaner beef. ..
In the years since then, egg producers figured out by feeding flaxseed to hens, they could elevate levels of omega-3 fatty acids in the yolks.

Aiming to do the same thing for pork and beef fat, the animal scientists are now at work genetically engineering omega-3 fatty acids into pigs and persuading cattle to lunch on flaxseed in the hope of introducing the blessed fish fat where it had never gone before: into hot dogs and hamburgers.

Pic: Avocado-mango salad with Passion fruit vinaigrette, epicurious.com

But whole foods are the exceptions. The typical whole food has much more trouble competing under the rules of nutritionism, if only because something like a banana or an avocado can't quite as readily change its nutritional stripes. (Though rest assured the genetic engineers are hard at work on the problem.)

To date, at least, they can't put oat bran in a banana or omega-3s in a peach. So depending on the reigning nutritional orthodoxy, the avocado might either be a high-fat food to be assiduously avoided (Old Think) or a food high in monounsaturated fat to be embraced (New Think). The fate and supermarket sales of each whole food rises and falls with every change in the nutritional weather while the processed foods simply get reformulated and differently supplemented.

That's why when the Atkins diet storm hit the food industry in 2003, bread and pasta got a quick redesign (dialing back the carbs; boosting the proteins) while poor unreconstructed potatoes and carrots were left out in the carbohydrate cold. (The low-carb indignities visited on bread and pasta, two formerly "traditional foods that everyone knows," would never have been possible had the imitation rule not been tossed out in 1973. Who would ever buy imitation spaghetti? But of course that is precisely what low-carb pasta is.)

A handful of lucky whole foods have recently gotten the "good nutrient" marketing treatment: The antioxidants in the pomegranate (a fruit formerly more trouble to eat than it was worth) now protect against cancer and erectile dysfunction, apparently, and the omega-3 fatty acids in the (formerly just fattening) walnut ward off heart disease. A whole subcategory of nutritional science — funded by industry and, according to one recent analysis,* remarkably reliable in its ability to find a health benefit in whatever food it has been commissioned to study — has sprung up to give a nutritionist sheen (and FDA-approved health claim) to all sorts of foods, including some not ordinarily thought of as healthy.

The Mars Corporation recently endowed a chair in chocolate science at the University of California at Davis, where research on the antioxidant properties of cacao is making breakthroughs, so it shouldn't be long before we see chocolate bars bearing FDA-approved health claims. (When we do, nutritionism will surely have entered its baroque phase.) Fortunately for everyone playing this game, scientists can find an antioxidant in just about any plant-based food they choose to study.

Yet as a general rule it's a whole lot easier to slap a health claim on a box of sugary cereal than on a raw potato or a carrot, with the perverse result that the most healthful foods in the supermarket sit there quietly in the produce section, silent as stroke victims, while a few aisles over in Cereal the Cocoa Puffs and Lucky Charms are screaming their newfound "whole-grain goodness" to the rafters. Watch out for those health claims.