On my soap box

Ready for a rant?  It is really frustrating to live with the consequences brought on by the dishonesty of the food industry.  The FDA allows commercial companies to clean up their labels by changing the names of the ingredients AND by hiding different ingredients under names that really don't mean anything.

For instance, what is the new name for sugar?  "Dehydrated cane juice."  It sounds less harmful, and if the one reading the label didn't think about it, it would be simple to skim over that name and not think about what it means.

And what does "natural seasoning" or "spices" mean?  All sorts of ingredients can be and are hidden under that umbrella.  The only way I know if it is benign or destructive to me is to eat it and wait for the headache.  Argh!  My one big wish for the FDA would be to require companies to list ingredients as they really are.

And here, possibly, comes another dishonest move.

The International Dairy Foods Association (IDFA) and the National Milk Producers Federation (NMPF) have filed a petition requesting they can flavor 17 dairy products using "non-nutritive sweeteners" (think aspartame, etc) without having to list it as an ingredient.  Right now they can do so if the food is listed as reduced calorie.  They want to change that.  Here is a quote from the FDA website.

However, IDFA and NMPF argue that nutrient content claims such as “reduced calorie” are not attractive to children, and maintain that consumers can more easily identify the overall nutritional value of milk products that are flavored with non-nutritive sweeteners if the labels do not include such claims. Further, the petitioners assert that consumers do not recognize milk—including flavored milk—as necessarily containing sugar. Accordingly, the petitioners state that milk flavored with non-nutritive sweeteners should be labeled as milk without further claims so that consumers can “more easily identify its overall nutritional value.”

What that says to me is that they want to put artificial sweeteners in milk products and not label it in any way, because then it will be easier for consumers to see how nutritious it really is.  

Hogwash!

If you would like to comment to the FDA about how you feel, visit this website.  Comments are welcome through May 20, 2013.

Enough ranting.  Back to real life.