Ritz Crackers are Not Grain: They Aren’t Even Food!

Ritz towerIn a recent news report a woman was fined $10 for not sending a grain in her child’s lunch, even though it had fresh vegetables including potatoes and carrots. The child’s lunch was supplemented with Ritz Crackers, under the pretense of providing the child with a grain.

This story appalls me on many levels.

First why was THIS child’s lunch the focus of persecution? What about the kids with fruit roll-ups, aka, sugar and food colour!?!?

What about the kids with white bread (stripped of its nutrients), slathered in margarine or mayonnaise, (hydrogenated “edible” oils, not food, but edible) and cancer-causing processed meat? That such a sandwich qualifies as food and fits nicely into the food pyramid is ghastly!

What qualifies a Ritz cracker as a grain?

Let’s examine the ingredients in a Ritz cracker.

Wheat Flour, (some labels say “enriched wheat flour”) Partially Hydrogenated Vegetable Oil (Soybean or Cottonseed), Sugar, Raising Agents (Ammonium and Sodium Bicarbonates, Disodium Diphosphate), Salt, High Fructose Corn Syrup, Soy Lecithin, Barley Malt Flour.

 

The main ingredient is wheat flour. It doesn’t say whole wheat so it means they’ve taken the whole grain, removed all

the nutritious parts and the fibre and left the starch. The law states they must replace some of the nutrients, namely niacin, iron, thiamin, riboflavin, folic acid. Sounds good until you realize that they add synthetic substances, and the body doesn’t necessarily use them in the same way as it does naturally occurring vitamins and minerals.

Grains in their whole state have fewer nutrients, pound for pound, than almost any whole food. Sure they have calories, but few of us have difficulties getting enough calories.

Our bodies need micronutrients like minerals and vitamins; we need fibre and proteins and healthy fats. Grains are not the best sources of any of these nutrients.

The next ingredient is vegetable oil (on some labels), soybean oil and cottonseed oils (on other labels). Soybean and cottonseed oils are most likely genetically modified, as 90% of North A

merican fields of these crops are GMO. GMOs have not been proven safe for human consumption and have been associated with severe environmental issues, including an increase in chemical usage, the creation of super weeds and super insects resistant to pesticides, destruction of soil ecology, and loss of biodiversity.

Ritz crackers info

In addition, the oil in a Ritz has been hydrogenated (adding hydrogen to convert liquid to solid) to give the food the right texture and mouth-feel and a significantly longer shelf life. Hydrogenation converts oil into a poison, as our bodies don’t know what to do with the resulting strange substance: trans fats.

Sugar is the next ingredient. Sugar is another poison in our food supply, contributing to over a hundred conditions and diseases. If it comes from sugar beet (as opposed to sugar cane) it is likely GMO and again, not proven safe for human consumption.

Then there’s baking powder and salt, and then more sugar, in the form of high fructose corn syrup, a sugar known to contribute to obesity and food addictions and usually GMO too. Food manufacturers often use several types of sugar so that they can list them separately and keep sugar from showing up first on all the labels. It’s a trick to keep us from realizing we are overdoing sugar.

About the only food value in a Ritz cracker is in the calories, which have been stripped of what little nutrients were in the grain and combined with unhealthy fat, sugar and salt.

What is really scary is that according to government-sponsored surveys, Ritz Crackers are the #1 perceived snack food in America.

If Ritz crackers are a staple in your diet, I suspect your body is starving. In North America we consume copious amounts of food but we are always hungry.

It’s because real food is so much more than calories or carbs, fat and protein. Real food is about the micronutrients that we can’t get from a processed food product like Ritz crackers.

After examining the evidence, what do you think?

Is a Ritz cracker a grain?

Is it even food?

Does it belong in your kid’s lunch?

My philosophy: Eat the Food, the Whole Food and Nothing but the Food.

Resources:

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2013/11/19/ritz-crackers-fine_n_4303073.html

http://www.snackworks.ca/en/products/Ritz.aspx

Book Review: In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan

indefenceoffoodRevised July 2013

This New York Times best seller is a book that everybody should read but most probably won’t.  So as a public service, I decided to write a summary of it.  Here are some of the most profound ideas in the book.

 

Pollan starts by sharing this mantra: “Eat food.  Not too much.  Mostly plants”.

 

He then describes “Nutritionism”: our idea of food broken down as individual nutrients and why that has become a problem for modern eaters.  We have begun to think of food as its parts: carbs, fats and proteins, totally missing the completeness of food and even its social implications.

 

Scientists typically study the individual components of food and are constantly baffled (or happy to report, depending on who is funding the study), that these parts are rather insignificant on their own.  Studies often totally miss the wonderful things that nutrients can do because they insist on studying them as if they exist in a vacuum.  Furthermore, when industry funds nutritional research, conclusions find favourable results for their products.

 

Some interesting facts:

 

  • ¼ of Americans suffer from metabolic syndrome (a combination of medical disorders that increase the risk of developing cardiovascular disease and diabetes).
  • 2/3 of Americans are overweight and diet-related diseases kill most people.
  • The more we worry about nutrition the less healthy we have become.
  • Despite our poor eating habits, western medicine is keeping us alive.  We haven’t reduced heart disease; we’re just surviving it because of the progress we’ve made in emergency rooms and developing certain drugs and surgeries that prolong our lives, but not necessarily the quality of life.
  • An estimated 80% of diabetes can be prevented by diet and exercise.
  • There is little will to prevent diabetes because tons of money is made selling diabetes gadgets and drugs and eventually, heart surgery; 80% of diabetics get heart disease.
  • When people from around the world come to North America and adopt our diet they begin to suffer from the same diseases that kill us: diabetes, cancer and heart disease.

 

The overriding message is to stop eating a western diet. Pollan offers this advice:

 

  • In general, avoid foods that make health claims.  (No matter how you look at them Froot Loops are NOT part of a healthy diet!)
  • Don’t eat anything your grandma or great-grandma would not recognize as food.
  • Don’t eat anything incapable of rotting.
  • Avoid food with ingredients that are unfamiliar, unpronounceable, more than five in number and contain High Fructose Corn Syrup.
  • Shop the peripheries of the supermarket; stay out of the middle.
  • More radically, stay out of supermarkets, whenever possible. Shop at farmer’s markets or CSA’s (community supported agriculture).
  • Shake the hand that feeds you. Seek shorter food chains. It is most desirable to have direct links between growers and eaters. More middlemen equal more problems. Shopping this way takes more time, money, and effort, but provides more nutrition.
  • Eat food in season for more taste and nutrition.
  • Eat mostly plants, especially leaves.  Pollan describes how the proliferation of grains in our diet is killing us.
  • You are what you eat and what you eat eats.  Pay attention to the diets of the animals you eat and the way the soil is fed. Eat well-grown food from healthy soils. Pollan quotes Wendell Berry regarding the problem of monoculture, which dominates modern agriculture: “…as scale increases, diversity declines, as diversity declines, so does health, as health declines, the dependence on drugs and chemicals necessarily increases.”
  • We are omnivores. We need variety. Try new things for biodiversity.  The author claims that one of the problems we suffer in our modern society is lack of diversity. There are 80,000 or more edible foods on earth. Of those, 3000 are widely used to provide us with the roughly 100 chemicals we need to survive and thrive.
  • The average North American derives 66% of calories from just four foods: corn, soy, wheat and rice. Sugar is also significant in the diet, leaving little room for other foods. Billions of dollars are spent subsidizing corn, soy, wheat and sugar and billions more are spent on advertising products made primarily from those products.

 

More of Pollan’s advice:

 

  • Eat wild foods when you can, like lambs quarters and purslane, common “weeds”.
  • Be the kind of person who takes supplements. These people are more health conscious, better educated, they exercise and take multivitamins and fish oil after age 50.
  • Eat traditional, ethnic diets. Beware of non-traditional foods. For example: the way North Americans eat soy is not healthy. We eat too much and we eat it unfermented. Soy is also fed to cattle; they re incapable of properly digesting it.

 

How to eat:

 

  • Eat slowly. Stop before you’re full. Use a smaller plate.
  • Spend more; eat less. Americans spend a smaller percent of income on food than any industrialized society.  (Canadians are not far behind them).  Pollan says it is no coincidence that as spending on food drops, spending on health care soars.
  • Eat at a table.
  • Have a glass of wine with dinner.
  • Don’t get your fuel from the same place as fuel for your car (at a gas station). The same fuel (corn) is used in bio-fuels and most packaged foods.

 

There is no magic bullet.

 

If you never get the chance to read In Defense of Food, you now know the basics.  I hope you’ve found this information as interesting and useful as I have.

 

Eat well!