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What Are We Eating

If you eat processed or packaged food, ideally you should be able to tell what is in the food you are eating by looking at the ingredient list and the nutrition facts label. However, this is not always the case and what you see on the label may not always be what you get.

Look at the labels of the processed foods in your home (i.e., boxed, bagged, canned, etc.). How

many of the ingredients can you pronounce, let alone comprehend their function and the repercussions of consuming them?

Aside from the potential errors with nutrition labels, product ingredients can also be misleading. For instance, food products that say they contain milk, fruit or vegetables may not contain them at all.

Further, allergenic ingredients may not be listed on food labels. Cross contamination, which can occur when the same equipment is used to manufacture multiple products, can potentially cause allergic products to be introduced to non-allergic products if equipment is not cleaned adequately.

There is also the potentially daunting task of trying to decipher what exactly certain ingredients are. For instance, if you were trying to avoid corn you would have to avoid not only anything listed as corn, but also:

• Malt
• Malt extract and syrup
• Sorbitol
•  Food starch
• Dextrin
• Fructose and fructose syrup
• Baking powder
• Monosodium glutamate
• Maltodextrin
• Starch
• Confectioner’s sugar

All of these items could potentially be made from corn, but unless you are specifically aware of what to look for it would be easy to overlook these items when looking for corn on an ingredient label.

However, here are two tips to ensure that you know exactly what you are eating:

• Don’t eat packaged or processed foods
• Eat whole foods
• Make your food at home

If you are used to relying on processed foods then this may sound difficult, but it is actually just a difference in mindset. Choosing whole foods like fresh produce, organic meat and eggs and other ‘real’ food is the natural way to eat, and once you start eating this way it will seem only natural to you. It’s true that eating whole foods will take you more time, but if you are interested in knowing exactly what you are putting into your body and changing your health for the better, it is well worth the effort.