Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Broths Contain Mysterious Ingredients

(NaturalNews - Tuesday, January 19, 2010 by: Jack Challem, citizen journalist)

There's a company that dominates the soup business, but its products are at best bland and mushy. You probably know who I'm talking about. Some of the company's soups contain so much salt that they're the human equivalent of a salt lick. For example, its chicken noodle soup dishes up a whopping 890 mg of sodium per serving, and 2,225 grams of sodium per can.

This company also owns the leading maker of various chicken broths and stocks. Until recently, that subsidiary spiked its tasteless products with monosodium glutamate (MSG), a flavor enhancer. But MSG is well documented as a cause of Chinese Restaurant Syndrome.

I'm not joking. Every Chinese restaurant used to boost the flavor of its meals by adding MSG. But a fair number of customers complained of neck and muscle aches afterwards, the result of MSG. So now, a lot of Chinese restaurants don't use MSG anymore.

But I digress.

The company recently introduced organic chicken, beef, and vegetable broths. Sounds like a great idea, right?

Well, the company's website admits that the broths contain 550 mg of sodium for each one-cup serving. If you like to use a lot of broth, that could add up to 1,100 mg of sodium per real-world serving. And maybe one blood-pressure cuff.

But no where on the company's website is a full listing of the products' other ingredients found. This is more than just peculiar, because all of the junk food and fast food companies you can think of list their product ingredients on their websites.

So that left me wondering what the soup and broth company might be hiding.

So I clicked to contact customer service and wrote a brief email asking for a complete list of ingredients for their organic products. Sounds simple enough, right?

A few days later, some anonymous person emailed me back:

"All of our products have nutritional labels that include the calorie, sodium, fat, cholesterol and carbohydrate content for a single serving. However, it is important to note that product recipes change frequently and ingredients are periodically added or replaced. Therefore, we suggest that you check each package for the most current nutritional information..."

So I wrote back and said that they had NOT answered my question. And I also wondered, adding a list of full ingredients to the website can't be all that difficult, could it? After all, it's got to be easier to update a web page compared with...say, reformulating the ingredients in an industrial-size soup and broth manufacturing facility.

Finally I went to both my local supermarket and health food store, but did not find any of the company's organic broths on the shelf. So their ingredients remain a mystery to me.

After all this, I can't help but wonder: Why couldn't the world's biggest soup company just be more up front about its ingredients and list them on its website? Unless, they really want to hide what's in them, that is.

Source: http://www.naturalnews.com/027973_broths_ingredients.html

Friday, January 8, 2010

The Plan for the Food Supply (comic)


The Plan for the Food Supply (comic)

There's a new plot underway to sterilize your food and destroy the nutritional value of fresh produce. The players in this plot are the usual suspects: The USDA (which backed the "raw" almond sterilization rules now in effect in California) and the American Chemical Society -- a pro-chemical group that represents the interests of industrial chemical manufacturers. The latest push comes from USDA researchers who conducted a study to see which method more effectively killed bacteria on leafy green vegetables like spinach.

To conduct the study, they bathed the spinach in a solution contaminated with bacteria. Then, they tried to remove the bacteria using three methods: Washing, chemical spraying and irradiation. Not surprisingly, only the irradiation killed nearly 100 percent of the bacterial colonies. That's because radiation sterilizes both the bacteria and the vegetable leaves, effectively killing the plant and destroying much of its nutritional value while it kills the bacteria.

The USDA claims this is a huge success. By using radiation on all fresh produce, they claim, the number of food-borne illness outbreaks that happen each year could be substantially reduced. It all makes sense until you realize that by destroying the nutritional value of all fresh produce sold in the United States, an irradiation policy would greatly increase the number of people killed by infections and chronic diseases that are prevented by the natural medicines found in fresh produce!

Why fresh, living produce helps prevent sickness

The USDA, you see, has zero recognition of the difference between living produce and dead produce. To uneducated government bureaucrats, pasteurized or irradiated vegetable juice is identical to fresh, raw, living vegetable juice. They believe this because they've never been taught about the phytonutrients, digestive enzymes and life force properties that are found in fresh foods, but that are destroyed through heat or irradiation. This, the USDA is operating out of extreme ignorance when it comes to food and nutrition.

Read more at Natural News: http://www.naturalnews.com/023014_food_food_supply_foods.html