Author Archives: gourmetmetrics

🔴Twinkies – poster child for UPF

Unlike many so many Americans, I did not grow up eatingTwinkies. My first bite was when I bought the package pictured above for the post. I plan to share my reaction to that first bite with you as well as why I’m not necessarily in favor of UPF being included in our dietary guidelines, but first let’s take a look at what makes Twinkies an ultra-processed food.

✅ Industrial Formulation. Twinkies are manufactured on an automated assembly line. Many videos of the processing available online. The production line can produce more than 1000 per minute.

✅ Industrial Processes. Twinkies are mass produced with ingredients that have been deconstructed like refined wheat flour, cornstarch, soy lecithin or chemically modified like high fructose corn syrup (HFCS).

✅ Cosmetic Additives. Twinkies are manufactured with colors (Red 40 and Yellow 5) and flavors (natural and artificial).

❌ Displace traditions and long-established culinary patterns. Twinkies probably haven’t displaced traditions or long-established culinary patterns here in the United States. The product appeared in the 1930s, almost 100 years ago, and over the generations Americans have come to accept convenience and off the shelf sweetened snacks as normal.

✅ Profitable. Just this year, the brand was sold to Smuckers for 5.6 billion dollars so it’s reasonable to conclude the product is profitable.

✅ Tasty. Twinkies are tasty. Whether that means palatable or hyper-palatable depends on who you talk to and who is doing the tasting.

My sense is Twinkies are an excellent poster child for ultra-processing. As good a poster child as any other food product I can think of. Now for that first bite. The Twinkie tasted decidedly sweet almost too sweet for my taste, but not unpleasant. My gut was not pleased however with the Twinkie. After about half an hour I felt some discomfort. Nothing at all serious and the discomfort didn’t last long. I tried another Twinkie the next day with the same result so I never finished the package.

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW.

Initially I was in favor of including NOVA and UPF in the next release of our dietary guidelines. But now I’m not so sure.

Americans who cook already appreciate NOVA because it’s hard to cook without using mostly minimally processed ingredients and most home cooks and chefs already bring a holistic perspective to food.

Americans who rely heavily on take out and convenience food have their own set of reasons for avoiding the kitchen and many of these reasons are valid and understandable. More money, more time, better cooking & storage options could help, but these are financial incentivizes and not related to degree of processing. Recommending a single mom with a couple of kids who works 2 jobs to buy more perishable food and to do more cooking at home is not going to solve financial problems.

I also think back to what happened when the USDA stopped being hostile to organic farming and enabled manufacturers to use the word on product labels. For those of who supported the original holistic view of organic, what we might call regenerative farming today, labeling food organic just meant that food manufacturers had one more label to market. Many, myself included, believe the official USDA process actually subverted the original vision and provided little value.

I’m sure once Big Food gets over being hostile to NOVA, the marketing departments will adapt quickly and discover creative ways to market more highly processed food using NOVA terminology.

So maybe, just maybe, it’s better to leave NOVA out of our guidelines. The holistic construct is fundamentally incompatible with the tool – the Healthy Eating Index (HEI) – used by my fellow dietitians to assess dietary guideline compliance. And I don’t see that reductionist approach changing anytime soon.

🟡Would your Great Grandmother Eat an Enchilada?


My great grandmother wouldn’t have a clue what to do with an enchilada. She was born and raised in Maine. She ate baked beans, cornbread, meat, potatoes, salt cod, wheat flour, and molasses. The word enchilada would have been unrecognizable.

Another word that would have no meaning to her is ultra-processed. But I’ll save those comments for later …

I love to talk about why my great grandmother wouldn’t recognize an enchilada because I love to poke fun at Michael Pollan’s ridiculous food rule – Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food. 

Thank goodness my great grandmother immigrated to California because I’ve been eating enchiladas all my life. Growing up in California, it’s hard to avoid Mexican food and I developed a taste for good street food early on. Burritos. Tamales. Chile Rellanos. And of course Enchiladas.

The enchilada pictured above is a frozen ready-to-heat meal developed by a manufacturer in California. The owners aren’t Mexican but they’ve focused on the plant based ingredients indigenous to authentic Mexican food. The frozen ready-meal is no match for a good street food vendor but in a pinch when I don’t have time to cook, a little convenience is appreciated.

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

Another one of Michael Pollan’s food rules is – Avoid food products that contain more than five ingredients. I count 20 ingredients in the ready-meal pictured above.

And 20 is a lot more than 5.

So I got to thinking about the line of demarcation between processed food and ultraprocessed food. Nutrition professionals and food scientists often disagree on which group a given food product should be placed in. The line of demarcation is especially squishy between Group 3 / Processed and Group 4 / Ultra-Processed. This frozen enchilada is a perfect example.

The ingredient list read as follows: filtered water, organic rice, organic pinto beans, organic corn tortillas (organic white corn, water, trace of lime), organic tomato purée, organic corn, organic onions, organic zucchini, organic bell peppers, organic tofu (filtered water, organic soybeans, magnesium chloride), organic pinto beans, expeller pressed high oleic safflower and/or sunflower oil, organic sweet rice flour, spices, sea salt, organic tapioca starch, olives, organic garlic, organic green chiles, chives.

• The case for UPF / Group 4. The ingredient count adds up to 20. Two of those ingredients can be classified as additives – magnesium chloride and tapioca starch. The product is also pre-prepared and ready to heat.

• The case for Processed / Group 3. The major ingredients are whole recognizable foods like corn kernels, pinto beans, the tortilla – all with the food matrix more or less intact. One of the additives, magnesium chloride, is a sea salt derivative and is used as coagulant for tofu/soybeans. The other, tapioca starch, is a commonly used thickener. Both products are marketed directly to consumers and could therefore be used in a home kitchen.

I call it the UPF kerfuffle. How should we resolve a situation where a single product qualifies for more than one NOVA group?

My solution will not satisfy food scientists and purists. But sometimes life intercedes and although it’s tempting I don’t always have a couple of discretionary hours to think about kerfuffles. So here’s my work around for products like the frozen enchilada that are made with whole intact recognizable components but are formulated with more than 5 ingredient. I put them Group 3 / Processed and think of them as G3>5.

Yes it’s subjective. Yes it’s sort of cheating. But it works. Especially useful when I’m busy and I don’t want to spend precious discretionary time knocking my head against kerfuffles.

Invasive Correctness and Seafood Linguine.

A philosophy of dietary correctness pervades our food environment. But before we get to that…

My kitchen smelled like the sea as I unwrapped the packages and start my preparation. Ingredients in descending order by weight are: hard durum wheat semolina pasta, shrimp, clams, scallops, wine, olive oil, fennel, garlic. All credible ingredients. If I just substituted whole wheat pasta for the hard durum wheat semolina pasta, the recipe would pass the test.

The reason I’m unwilling to make the switch is based on the taste and texture of the pasta. I’ve experimented with whole wheat pasta both domestic and imported brands but the products don’t cook the same way and the finished dish doesn’t taste the same.

This correctness approach requires a binary decision. The argument for ignoring taste, texture, and the Italian tradition in a binary system is because the food component will not pass. And since both sodium and saturated fat are below respective compliant thresholds with the right serving size, it’s a business no-brainer.

What would I advise a client on a labeling strategy? To the independent restaurant managed by a chef owner I would tell them not to bother with nutrition. For a retail provider I would recommend considering a substitution because it’s too complex trying to explain the winner take all approach if the only two options are healthy or not healthy. That’s apparently what many of the global manufacturers of breakfast cereals have done. They’ve reformulate many product substituting whole wheat for refined wheat flour to increase the fiber grams on the label.

But I’m thinking to myself – what a choice!

 VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

A philosophy of dietary correctness pervades our food environment. My seafood linguine isn’t “healthy” because I use durum wheat semolina pasta imported from Italy instead of whole wheat pasta. Despite all other benefits on the plate – variety of seafood, Omega-3 fatty acids, an artful presentation, the taste of deliciousness – the plate fails.

Sitting here in my kitchen and gazing out the window I’m remembering the advantages of one on one counseling sessions. If I were talking to a client right now about the difference between traditional imported hard durum wheat pasta and whole wheat pasta, I could acknowledge the taste difference between the two and we could discuss alternative sources of fiber.

I could describe to my client how the kitchen smells like the sea as I unwrapped the packages and start my preparation. I could encourage my client to be an adventurous cook and share my expertise on buying Little Neck clams and local scallops and why I prefer shrimp harvested in the Gulf or Carolinas compared to commodity farmed shrimp.

I could talk about Italian culture and tradition and the taste and texture differences between an Italian brand of pasta that has been extruded using bronze-cut dyes as opposed to commodity pasta which is manufactured with wheat flour and the more common Teflon dyes. And if the client like the taste of beans or peas or lentils – all excellent sources of intact fiber- we could explore recipes from traditional Italian cooking which include these plant based beauties.

 A labeling approach that reduces benefits and risks down to a single icon like the proposed FDA update or The Kiss Test forces a binary choice. All components need to pass the test and the product or recipe either passes or fails. The plate is either one or the other. Good or Bad. Winner or Loser. Pass or Fail.

It’s not the smartest approach for encouraging people to eat healthier in my humble opinion.

Spring Salad – a picture is worth 1000 labels.

Take a look at the picture above and ask yourself this question.

Which is better evidence of healthfulness – the picture of the salad or the Nutrition Facts Label? But before we get to that …

During the summer I make lots of salads. And all my salads tend to follow the same basic pattern – a variety of crunchy raw greens, some protein, and some canned or home cooked beans.  This is actually the salad I prepared when a fellow dietitian came to lunch a couple weeks ago. Delicious and refreshing and just right for a casual get together on one of those lovely almost warn spring Hudson Valley days.

This salad was made with mostly minimally processed fresh vegetables – escarole, radicchio, arugula, avocado, tomato – and a couple of freshly boiled eggs. I used traditionally processed canned chickpeas and canned tuna whereas the olive oil, vinegar, and salt are culinary processed. Only the small amount of Dijon mustard I used to emulsify the salad dressing and a couple of marinated baby artichokes qualify as ultra-processed. A super NOVA friendly salad!

I served the salad as the main dish and I figure we each ate about 2 to 3 Cups, the amount reflected in the label.

All my salads failed the original thresholds established by the FDA for fat, saturated fat, and sodium back in 1994. This time around, however, the saturated fat assessment depends on the protein food source.

Salads like the one pictured above made with seafood and eggs catch a break when it comes to counting saturated fat grams so my salad benefits from the addition of both canned tuna and hard boiled eggs.

The sodium thresholds have also been relaxed. So I’m happy to report that my salad is co,pliant and will pass the nutrient component as long as the correct reference amount is used for labeling purposes.

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

The last time I ran numbers on my own recipes was about 15 years ago. I never finished the project because I got so angry. None of my recipes met the low fat / saturated fat, or low sodium thresholds required for compliance. So I resigned myself early on to being a dietitian who loved vegetables and whole grains and fresh fruits but choose not to eat “healthy”.

This time around I’m finding more recipes pass the Kiss of Death Test.

But the Nutrition Facts Label has left its mark. Many ordinary Americans think more about nutrients than they do about food. It’s taken me almost 30 years to wrap my head the significance of what my study of nutrition really means but I think I may have finally figured a few things out.

Over the last 4 decades, food has evolved from something familiar and tangible that we make at home in our kitchens into a product that is manufactured, packaged, labeled, and sold. As the label has become increasingly important in determining “healthfulness”, so has our collective  reliance on experts for interpretation.

I am concerned that many of my fellow Americans put more trust in a label than they do in their own ability to make a decision for themselves.

Split Pea Soup – enjoyment is essential.

Expecting food to taste good is a legitimate expectation and guidelines for eating healthy need to acknowledge the legitimacy of this expectation. But before we get to that …

It’s the middle of May here in New York’s Hudson Valley but there’s still enough chill in the air to justify a bowl hot steaming soup. Probably the last batch of the season however so when this pot is gone, no more soup until October or November.

Making my own means I decide which ingredients to use – extra virgin olive oil, lots of aromatics, and the right amount of salt for palatability. I wish one of the commercial manufacturers would come up with a way to make soup the way I like it. Current soup brands use too much salt and brands that market low salt versions are bland.

Nothing comes for free and soup making is time consuming – lots of chopping and prep work – not to mention the hour or two it takes to slowly soften those dry little green half sized peas plus putting the soup through my food mill, portioning it out, and freezing the units.

That’s why I wish I had a better option. But I don’t …

All my soups are NOVA friendly because they are all freshly prepared with minimally processed and culinary processed ingredients. Listed in descending order by weight, the ingredients are water, green split peas, onion, carrot, fennel, olive oil, parsley, salt.

Despite all the quality ingredients, the soups fails the test.

Why you maybe asking? Too much salt.

I’m a bit of a contrarian dietitian here because first I make the soup that tastes good to me, then I go back and run the numbers to determine the stats. The label posted above is based on a generous cup, a little more that the reference amount of 245 grams. Usually home cooking is an excellent strategy for reducing dietary sodium. There are exceptions however and the most notable exception is soup.

My soups are not nearly as high as commercial brands which have almost twice as much sodium. And that is why, for me at least, commercial brands taste much too salty.

THE VIEW FROM MY KITCHEN WINDOW

Palatable is a loaded word.

My fellow dietitians prefer to use words like nutrient-dense and healthy dietary patterns.

On the other side of the binary divide, cooks, chefs, food manufacturers, and eaters talk a lot about good tasting food. These folks may not actually use the word palatable but there is all round expectation that food should taste good.

Healthy is important, but enjoyment is essential. So even when I use all the tricks in the usual dietitian’s healthy eating playbook and it’s not enough, I say to myself, palatable beats healthy and it’s okay to break the rules.

Healthy is getting an update. Finally.

photo credit | gourmetmetrics

Pictured above is a breakfast cereal designed to appeal to the healthy eating crowd. How can we tell? Because every available corner has been used to display a symbol or claim suggesting healthfulness.

NEW RULES FOR HEALTHY

Thanks to a recent FDA proposed update for labelling food healthy, breakfast cereals like the one pictured above may want to make the claim at some point in the future.

To pass the first hurdle, the product must actually contain food from one of the 5 Food Groups. The ingredient list for the cereal pictured above minus additives and fortification reads as follows: whole grain wheat, raisins, cane sugar, whole grain rolled oats, dates, wheat flour, malted barley flour, rice flour, pecans, expeller pressed canola oil, salt, rice syrup, molasses.

Note that the manufacturer tells us in big bold letters that the product provides 32 grams whole grains as certified by the Whole Grain Council. That certification is a good indicator that the cereal has some whole grain. If 32 grams is enough whole grain to meet the proposed standard, there is a good chance the cereal will past the first hurdle and therefore meet the requirements to be classified as a GRAIN.

The second hurdle is nutrient based. Checking the label for nutrients, we see Saturated Fat is listed as 0 grams per serving and Sodium is well below the new 230 mg limit per serving. So far so good. There is a problem, however, and the problem is Added Sugar. The grams of added sugar exceed the newly proposed limit as measured by percentage Daily Value. In order for this cereal to qualify for the healthy claim, the manufacturer would need to reformulate.

THE CONUNDRUM

A conundrum is a confusing and difficult problem or question. With the proposal for new rules, both manufacturers and consumers have tough decisions to make.

Manufacturers who decide to reformulate have a wide range of options from artificial sweeteners to concentrated fruit purée and date paste. Manufacturers always of course have the option of ignoring the healthy claim and continuing to use all the other symbols and certifications to communicate healthfulness.

Consumers also have tough decisions. Some healthy eating enthusiasts will demand the products they buy display the healthy claim. Not all of course because other enthusiasts want sugar while still others will want to avoid artificial or laboratory synthesized sweeteners. Still others may believe traditional sugars are actually a better choice despite the fact the product can’t make a healthy claim.

HOWEVER …

Neither the degree of processing or fortification will impact the manufacturers right to claim the product is healthy as per the current proposal.

Check out the picture posted above and take a good look at the middle box identified as “FLAKES & CLUSTERS”. The flakes are identifiable as whole grain rolled oats. But those clusters? They look to my untrained eye like clumps of brown goo. Perhaps the end product of whole grain wheat that has been pulverized into a fine powder, mixed with a liquid, than extruded into a pre-formed “cluster”. Besides enrichment which is mandated, the cereal is fortified with 13 other vitamins and minerals.

Here’s my prediction. We will be talking a lot more about what is and is not food from now on.

 

 

Summer Salads

Salads make delicious summer meals. Ingredients used for the salad pictured above are: tuna (seafood), white beans (pulses), cucumber, avocado, escarole, tomatoes, boiled egg, olive oil, scallions, vinegar, mustard, salt.

That Nutrition Facts Panel pinned next to the salad set the portion as 3 cups because that’s about how much we eat for a dinner serving. Using FDA guidelines for determining “healthfulness”, I’ve highlighted the nutrient risks in red and the nutrient benefits in green.

HEALTHY – AS PER LABELED SERVING FOR 3 CUPS:

High Saturated Fat. Fatty Acid Ratio is favorable. High Sodium. High Potassium. Potassium to Sodium ratio is favorable. High Dietary Fiber. Fiber to Carbohydrate Ratio is favorable. 34 grams Protein. Good Source/High certain nutrients to encourage.

As you can see, nutrient risks and benefits are intertwined in complex patterns. Marketeers and Food Labelers earn their living by getting rid of the red. It’s not hard to do. Canola oil for olive oil.  Tuna canned in water with no added salt. What’s more challenging is getting the flavor complex right.

RE-THINKING HEALTHY

Other models of healthy have been proposed like nonGMO, intermittent fasting, paleo, vegan. And of course degree of processing, a model popularized by Michael Pollan but based on a serious document published in 2009 entitled NOVA.

Here’s how my salad looks through the NOVA lens.

The beans, all the vegetables, and egg are minimally processed. Olive oil, vinegar, and salt are considered processed culinary ingredients. The canned tuna is processed and that little dash of Dijon mustard added to the vinaigrette is industrially formulated with two markers – citric acid and metabisulfite.

I appreciate the NOVA classification system but the approach has nothing to do with how I make my summer salads. I look for minimally processed quality ingredients because I value taste and flavor. The heirloom small white beans are home cooked in salted water because the flavor is more nuanced than any canned variety on the shelf. Robust escarole has more complex flavors and a crunchier leaf than commodity mesclun. The remaining vegetables each add different colors and textures. And I use 100% California extra virgin olive oil because well to be honest because I’m a Californian. Vinegar adds acid and salt accents the flavors already present in the bowl.

Each ingredient in the salad brings something special to the plate. The end result is a mixture of robust textures and complex flavors.

The End of Craving for my Dietitian Colleagues

photo credit | gourmetmetrics

That’s my well worn copy of Mark Schatzker’s most recent book pictured above. It’s a book that asks a good question. Why have we been getting fatter over the last 40 years?

Each chapter takes us through a series of seemingly unconnected events. Towards the end of the book, we learn this from the author “so here then is the theory spelled out: the obesity epidemic is being fueled by advancements in food technology that have disrupted the brain’s ability to sense nutrients, altered eating behavior, and given food an unnatural energetic potential”. 

My plan is to review this book in terms of my training and experience as a dietitian during the 15 years I worked in weight loss. I got my RDN in 1997 and worked in corporate wellness, weight loss counselling, and bariatric wellness.

The book begins with two approaches to disease. Pellagra is caused by a vitamin deficiency. The disease is prevalent when the food supply does not include a source of niacin. Both the United States and Italy have experienced periodic bouts of pellagra. In Italy, the government encouraged its inhabitants to raise rabbits and drink yeasty wine. In the US, the government recommended fortification of grains. Both solutions worked but the metaphor of a fork in the road between the old way and the new way dominates the book.

I went back to school to study nutrition in the early 1990s and remember to this day my sense of wonder as I learned about the discovery of vitamins and the miracle of enrichment. I was delighted to learn that nutrients like niacin could cure diseases like pellagra.

We explore the brain-gut connection with a trip to Lyon and the experiments of a French psychologist with bathwater temperature and starvation. We move to Bethesda Maryland and a Kevin Hall presentation on the results of the analysis he ran on contestants in the Reality TV show The Biggest Looser. We spend time with illiterate laborers in Karnataka and learn why these men love the bitter taste of tamarind. And we end with the work of Kent Barringer who was the first to differentiate the brain’s “wanting” circuitry (dopamine driven) from the brain’s “liking” circuitry.

Schatzker is a brilliant writer and able to put complex concepts into understandable common language. Despite my training as an RDN, I struggled to follow the intricacies of brain science and neurotransmitter patterns. I got my Certificate of Training Adult Weight Management 2001 but at that time obesity was considered a behavior disorder. My training focused on helping clients navigate the ever more enticing calorie proliferation of the modern food environment.

We explore “wanting” vs “liking” with a visit to Yale and a laboratory scientist who studies glucose metabolism. We investigate the seemingly irrational behavior of compulsive gamblers, learn how Swedish gerbils behave when fed a mixture of seeds and grains of sand, and take a whirlwind tour of food technology innovations over the last 40 years. Schatzker coined the term “nutritive mismatch” to describe a situation where our taste perception confuses the signaling system of the brain  

The science of neurotransmitters and the brain / gut connection was in its infancy when I got my certification. Swedish pharmacologist, Arvid Carlsson, had just been awarded the Nobel Prize in 2000 for his contributions on the neurotransmitter, dopamine. The counseling techniques I learned were based on an assumption Schatzker refers to as “The Hungry Ape” theory. We humans gorge on food when it’s available so we have fat stores to carry us through to the next starvation cycle.

Finally we take a vacation in 19th century Italy with Goethe. We delight in eating figs, pears, macaroni, and Sicilian lettuce. We study the stalking behaviors of snakes, learn about the evolutionary benefits of our “liking” food brain circuitry, delve into the beginnings of concentrated animal feeding operations and the development of scientifically managed swine rations.

Pigs get sick if all they are fed is corn and soy. Research done in the late 1940s enabled hog farmers to maintain a nutritionally adequate diet as animals moved from foraging in pasture to a feeding lot diet of corn and soy meal. When B vitamins were added to the feed, the hogs no longer got sick. Even better, the hogs gained weight faster. If adding B vitamins to hog feed as was done back in middle of the last century promoted weight gain, could the same weight gain happen in humans? Is it possible that enrichment could actually be a contributing factor to human weight gain? Oh my goodness! That is exactly what Schatzker said. It took my breath away. I had to put the book down.

At no point in my nutrition studies has anyone questioned the value of enrichment. Or fortification for that matter. These policies were presented as unqualified nutrition success stories. I never realized until I read Schatzker’s book that most European countries don’t enrich or fortify grains.

We end with a celebration of the power of good food by visiting Leipzig Germany and a doctor who works with clinically severe obese patients. We savor the taste of a perfectly crafted dark chocolate and the culinary equivalent of pastoral romanticism as the writer celebrates and indulges in the joy of eating really good northern Italian food.

We are left with a metaphoric fork in the road. Italy represents the old fork. The United States represents the new fork. And we are left with a speculation. Maybe if we restore the relationship between flavor, nutrition, and enjoyment that food provides, we will have a chance to change eating habits and health status.

These concepts are not completely outside the RDN tool box, but for the vast majority of my dietitian colleagues, Schatzker’s book will be hard to read because it challenges aspects of our training and core principles like the acceptance of enrichment and fortification as a net positive. Or the acceptance of artificial sweeteners and sugar substitutes as categorically safe and without health-related consequence.

My first job in dietetics was nutrition counseling at a corporate wellness gym. My clients were social media savvy and would frequently bring a wild and crazy ideas to our sessions. I never directly confronted clients.  Instead I explained there were two types of people out there in blogosphere. Most are predatory charlatans who are only interested in their own self-enrichment but there are always a couple of brilliant folks who are just slightly ahead of their time. Then I would add, sometimes it’s damnably difficult to tell which is which.

My reading of The End of Craving is that Schatzker is just slightly ahead of his time.

The opposite ends of the ultra-processed spectrum.

photo credit | gourmetmetrics | my picture is neither an endorsement nor a product placement

Yellow pea is all the rage. Commodity brokers are taking bets. Plant-based product developers are placing large orders. Farmers are increasing acreage. So what’s all the fuss about? Why you may be asking is the humble field pea suddenly in high demand? Because of these two simple facts. Yellow pea is 23% protein. And it’s not soy.

Beyond Meat is made with yellow pea. It’s listed as pea protein on the label and is the second ingredient (the first ingredient being water). Pea protein isolate is what’s left after fat and carbohydrate (fiber) have been removed.

Golden Lentil Indian Dal, pictured above, is also made with yellow pea. It’s listed as yellow split pea on the label and is also the second ingredient list after water.

What’s truly astonishing, to me at least, is the ingredient lists for these two products start with exactly the same two ingredients. It’s the ingredients that follow which determine the respective position of each product within the ultra-processed group and places the two products at opposite ends of the spectrum.

The ingredients in the soup are similar to the ingredients I use in my homemade lentil soup – extra virgin olive oil, aromatics, spices, salt. Each retains its integrity with minimal disruption to the matrix and reflects the culture and traditions of Central Asia – yellow split peas, garlic, onion, ginger, coriander, turmeric, and red chili pepper.

Not so for the burger. What follows the water and pea protein is a list of 20 plus deconstructed, reduced, and fragmented components which are then reconstructed to look, feel, taste, and smell like beef. The only ingredient on the list that I count as an intact food is water.

Both products are industrial formulations (read ultra-processed) but the burger is at the most heavily processed end of the spectrum whereas the dal is at the other end of the spectrum. Both are ultra-processed but there are major differences.

The question I’m asking is how much does it matter?

Yikes! My favorite cookies have no nutrition facts label!

photo credit | gourmetmetrics

photo credit | gourmetmetrics.

Pictured above are my favorite oatmeal raisin cookies. Let’s call them the next best thing to freshly baked. Each little package is processed for local distribution with a list of ingredients but, on closer examination, you’ll notice something is missing.

All manufacturers are required to label products. But only some manufacturers are required to add nutrition facts. When a package of cookies like this one is sold without a nutrition facts label, it means the production batch is small.

So I started thinking, do I really need to know the nutrition stats for these very tasty cookies?

We already know cookies are calorie dense. Most cookies are 400 to 500 calories per 100 grams / 110 to 140 calories per ounce. I weighed the cookies from the package pictured above. The results – a serving size of one cookie (about 45 grams / 1.5 ounces) clocks in at 200 calories plus / minus 50.

We already know cookies are indulgent. The basic formulation is always the same no matter if the cookies are freshly baked with your grandmother’s recipe or turned out in massive numbers using industrial processing and technology. That formulation is flour, sugar, and fat. Most folks don’t need a label to tell them cookies are high in fat and sugar and calorie dense.

We always have an ingredient list. The cookies pictured above are made from organic wheat flour, brown sugar, butter, raisins, oats, eggs, salt, vanilla extract, baking powder, baking soda. It’s a clean list of quality ingredients with oats being a good source of fibers. Butter instead of less expensive palm or canola oil. Brown sugar instead of dextrose or high fructose corn syrup. No gums or emulsifiers to improve the texture. No preservatives to keep the cookies shelf stable for years so eat quickly or store in the freezer. 

So you see there’s a lot we can do using common sense and an ingredient list. Our nutrition facts label serves manufacturers and analysts well, but it’s not consumer friendly. Most countries have experimented with various formats, symbols, graphics but, in my observation at least, no one has found an optimal approach. I like to think of nutritional labeling as a work in progress. In the meantime, a little common sense goes a long way.