By Penelope A. Domogo, MD
Before you buy any packed food item, do you care to read the ingredients? It may be labeled “milk” and you just believe it is what you think “milk” is. But do you really know what is in that package? Chances are you didn’t read the ingredients- for one, the letters are too small and you didn’t bring your eyeglasses or you read the label but you didn’t really know what “maltodextrin” is. And since it is tasty, it comes in an attractive wrapping, it is sold openly, your friends buy it, and you didn’t drop dead when you ate it or drank it, you buy it. No questions asked… except one “Ay naimas sa?”, “masarap ba?”. We don’t ask “Is it safe?” or “Is it healthy?”
Let us look closely at some popular items in the grocery stores and which I have often been asked to identify. One favorite item for babies- CERELAC in big bold letters. I looked at one 120 grams pack which had “RICE AND SOYA” in smaller letters but big enough to read I didn’t need my glasses. But for the ingredients, I really had to don my glasses. Ingredients are “rice flour, soya flour, sucrose, skimmed milk powder, palm olein, calcium carbonate, sodium phosphate, sodium chloride, soya lecithin, fish oil, taurine, ferric pyrophosphate, vanillin, zinc sulphate and vitamins. May contain traces of gluten.”
If at this point you are overwhelmed by those terms, you are not alone. Rice and soya flour I know, sucrose means ordinary sugar, skimmed milk powder is low fat dried milk, sodium chloride is refined salt (meaning only sodium and chloride with no other minerals), fish oil is fish oil. The rest I had to go to the internet and dictionary. Food additives and food processing were not discussed in medical school as far as I remember. In the internet I got what seemed like a whole library on food additives and I wrote about this recently. According to Webster, “food additive is a natural or artificial substance that is added to food during processing to make it look or taste better or last longer.” They are preservatives, flavorings, colorings, anticaking agents, antifoaming agents, etc., most of which are artificial.
So now you know what you are feeding your baby- you were attracted to the label “RICE and SOYA” but that is not all. It is rice and soya flour PLUS animal milk, sugar, salt and a lot of other food additives.
How about other favorites?
MILO
Ingredients: extract of malted barley, milk solids, sugars, cocoa, vegetable oil, buffer salts, ACTIGEN-E vitamins ( Vits. C, B3, B5, B6, B2, B1, B8,B12), iron pyrophosphate , vanillin, creamer, maltodextrin.
In other words, MILO is milk and sugar and oil with cocoa and a mixture of chemicals. Malted barley is barley that is allowed to germinate a little then dried and maltodextrin is a kind of sugar. Whey in milk can trigger a migraine.
COFFEEMATE:
Ingredients: glucose syrup, hydrogenated vegetable fats, sodium caseinate (milk protein), sequestrants, nature identical flavors, sodium chloride, anti-caking agents (CM100), emulsifiers .
So there you are, COFFEEMATE is still sugar, milk, fat, salt and other additives. Hydrogenated vegetable fat is trans-fat and trans-fat is implicated in heart disease. Casein is milk protein and some people are allergic to it. Casein is also implicated in cancer and heart disease. Only babies need milk and nature’s law is that milk should come from their own mothers.
BONNA: (the label said “for 1-3 years old”)
Ingredients: nonfat milk powder, maltodextrin, vegetable oils, sucrose, and some other food additives.
YAKULT
Ingredients: dried skim milk, sugar, glucose, live lactobacillus casei, flavor added.
Now you will not be surprised why these products are so tasty. Ever tasted breastmilk?
Ms. Ma. Mercedes Ferrer, Executive Director of HEALTH WITHOUT HARM, Southeast Asia Office, said “there are 70,000-100,000 chemicals used in commerce and 1,500 are introduced annually each year and yet we don’t have health and environmental data on majority of these chemicals.” Many of these questionable chemicals are used in food processing, whether at home or in the factory.
The product names mentioned here are just brand names given by the manufacturer and their contents or ingredients can be changed anytime. Just for this issue, I compared 2 packs of the same product name and their ingredients were not the same.
Let us learn from a wise woman of Tetep-an. One potluck lunch after our Sunday mass in St. Mary’s Church, I proudly offered her vegetarian ham – and she refused, saying she doesn’t know what that was! I looked at it closely and sure enough, it was pink and nowhere looking like a vegetable or meat.
We pride ourselves, especially in Mountain Province and Benguet, that we are a highly literate country. Let us put that literacy to good use- READ THE LABELS. You DON’T NEED to buy foodstuff you don’t know what it is and whose ingredients you can’t even pronounce.**
