Sholeh: Mad about food

We just returned from a 10-day trip to England, and I came back rather peeved.

You see, basic foods across the pond actually taste good. Strawberries, cucumbers and grapes have flavor I haven’t experienced here for decades. Gas station sandwiches aren’t gross. My body felt better there.

Even their soda and snacks — many exactly the same U.S. brands — have fewer calories. American sodas have up to seven teaspoons more sugar per can or bottle than their European counterparts. 

The ingredients on the bottle of Lipton peach iced tea I drank in England were simply tea, and fruit juice, with sugar as the last ingredient at fewer than 50 calories. In the U.S., Lipton’s peach tea ingredients are water, high fructose corn syrup, tea, plus four chemicals at 110 calories.

Over there, products lack the carcinogenic, unhealthy chemicals, dyes, and additives used here, despite knowing what they do to our bodies and moods. Food producers in Europe and the U.K. continue to turn a profit without them. Go figure.

Take British Sunny D: Water, fruit juices, sugar, vitamins. That’s it. No dyes, no chemicals at all. American Sunny D, which we give to our kids: Water, high fructose corn syrup, juices, vitamins, corn starch canola oil, four chemicals I can’t pronounce, sucralose, and two dyes.

McDonald’s, Heinz ketchup, Doritos, Quaker Oats: Same deal. One study published in the October 2022 issue of Public Health Nutrition discovered that American chain restaurants such as Applebee’s, Starbucks and Domino's prepared the same entrees (including kids meals) differently in different countries, with healthier calorie and nutrition content in their UK and European restaurants than in U.S. locations.

If you really want to get mad, compare Campbell’s soup. The British and European versions last for years and list water, vegetables, meats, spices. Pure food, nothing else. Pick one up here and you’ll see a bunch of things you can’t pronounce produced in a lab somewhere.

It’s canned soup. We don’t need all that.

Why care? It’s only your body, health and longevity at stake. Why don’t they have that junk in foreign-locale foods? Because that junk is illegal there, knowing it harms bodies. These artificial tools food producers and commercial farms started using a few decades ago to grow it bigger, preserve it longer and so on are slowly killing us.

I’m all for a free market economy and healthy businesses, but we are supposed to draw the line at actual harm. And we’re just about the only country that doesn’t do so proactively.

At least eight ingredients in U.S. foods are banned elsewhere: rBGH (injected in cows to increase milk production, but causes human allergic reactions), ractopamine (increases animal muscle mass; connected to human cardiac problems), potassium bromate (fluffier bread; linked to bronchial inflammation), brominated vegetable oil (used in soda; irritates mouth and nose), olestra (a fat-free substitute causing bloating), azodicarbonamide (bleaches flour; linked to asthma symptoms); and the potentially carcinogenic dyes (Red No. 40, etc. — do we really care how pretty food looks?), BHA, and BHT.

Food additives such as these have been linked in university studies to cancers, pregnancy and fertility problems, lung and heart problems and much more.

And don’t get me started on pesticides. They’re supposed to be washed off but according to annual research in a March 20 CNN article, 95% of nonorganic fruits and vegetables tested contain detectable levels of pesticides, linked to birth defects, heart disease and genetic damage in people who consume or work with them.

Our legal philosophy is a big part of the problem. The FDA requires companies to list only about half the allergens on food products as our EU counterparts do. 

America is reactive; our law allows a substance to be used until proven harmful (research seems to have already done that). Europe, by contrast, is proactive, only allowing them in foods after they have been proven safe. Powerful lobbies (like America’s multimillion-dollar PFAS, the food additive lobby) mean nothing there. Food is considered a health priority and human health trumps other interests.

The result isn’t just less inflammation, better health and a sense of security in available, cheap food (and I can testify from recent experience that it is actually cheaper in UK). Without these plumping, coloring, preserving, enlarging additives, the nutrition per ounce their bodies absorb is greater with the purer stuff. As we’ve added more of that junk over the decades, data indicates our food has less nutrition per calorie consumed than ever.

And frankly, food grown and produced without all this actually tastes better. And yes, I’m including organic produce and meat, which is most of what I buy.

So why do we keep doing this? More to the point, what can we do about it?

Obviously, the less processed, packaged food we eat, the better. We could improve at eating what’s in season and locally grown, rather than expecting the same stuff year-round, harvested too early and trucked in.

Another idea is commercial disincentive. Some nations have extra taxes on products with more than a threshold amount of sugar in them, like the “sin” tax we put on alcohol and tobacco.

But the biggest issue is we are overdue to convince regulators to get rid of the harmful stuff. A few members of Congress, advocacy groups and farmers are already trying and could use our support.

Even at the FDA, there is hope. Last year, the FDA actually proposed to revoke its permission for brominated vegetable oil (BVO) after some studies concluded it was harmful and California had already banned it. The FDA can revoke it on its own, but a letter campaign about this and revoking other additives wouldn’t hurt. Write the FDA at 10903 New Hampshire Ave., Silver Spring, MD 20993.

Advocacy groups such as Earth Justice are popping up to wage this war over food. Just be careful whom you choose to support. While some are careful about the data they spread, others just repeat without verifying numbers. I’m a believer, but it’s better to align with fact-checkers than passion-inflamers.

Finally, you can write your members of Congress about this (www.congress.gov/members/find-your-member) and share it online. Imagine how powerful that would be if each of us did both? This is our food we are talking about; it doesn’t get more basic or important. Millions of Americans demanding it could make it happen, and make us all healthier.

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Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network who’s mad about food, for the sake of future generations. Email sholeh@cdapress.com.